Howard Portnoy noted earlier today the impact of interesting photos from the carefully photo-managed meeting on Wednesday between President Obama and Texas Governor Rick Perry in Dallas. Obama (and indeed his whole side of the table) were giggling wildly over something, while Perry and Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins looked dour and unamused.
The signal from that photo commemoration was at least ambiguous. Not so the signal from a photo gallery hosted at Yahoo! today, with a series of nine AP and Reuters photos displayed under this headline:
President Obama visits the border
Of course, as alert LU readers know perfectly well, President Obama has done no such thing. The whole point of Rick Perry’s demand to meet with him is that Obama hasn’t visited the border, isn’t going to visit the border, and has no intention of stopping the flow of illegal migrants across the border from Mexico into Texas.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Nevertheless, the headline “President Obama visits the border” appears above each of nine photos that show him doing something else, hundreds of miles from the border. Apparently, the purpose is to leave a falsely reassuring impression in the mind of the low-information news customer. It can’t be credibly argued that whoever put this photo gallery together actually thought Obama was visiting the border.
(UPDATE: Just about the time I was adding this post, my colleague Michael Dorstewitz posted a riff on Obama’s hilarious claim that he’s not going to the border because he’s “not interested in photo-ops.” Now, that’s some funny, right there, but it’s also a reason to point out that there’s a three-fer completed in this Yahoo spread: a combination of photo-op denial, actual photo-ops, and an impressionistic allusion to visiting the border — even if there’s not a photo at the border in the mix. Thus goes the course of propaganda. Whatever lies beyond having your cake and eating it too, Obama and the MSM may having achieved it, at least with some drive-by news customers.)
I’ve screen-capped three of the falsely headlined photos for posterity, in case Yahoo thinks better of this at some point and tries to remove it from the web.
