Twitter found something to be mad about in the 50th anniversary march on Selma Saturday, and it was the New York Times’ front page photo, which centered on President Barack Obama, with President George W Bush out of frame. Many conservative tweeters accused the Gray Lady of “cropping” the Republican president out:
Suprise, suprise: @nytimes Crops Out George W. Bush From Their #Selma50 Front Page Picture
via @trscoop
http://t.co/WDE3FW08SX
— Sean Spicer (@seanspicer) March 8, 2015
Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan asked the paper’s photo editor Michele McNally about the photo. “There was no crop,” McNally said. “This was the photo as we received it.”
Times photographer Doug Mills, who took the photo and tweeted it out as is on Saturday, explained:
Just so you know … at the time the photo was taken, I was using a 70-200 long zoom lens. I also had a remote camera with a wide-angle lens attached to the side of the truck that took a photo at the just about the exact moment as the tighter one. As you can see, Bush was in the bright sunlight. I did not even send this frame because it’s very wide and super busy and Bush is super-overexposed because he was in the sun and Obama and the others are in the shade.
(This is, in short, exactly what Mediaite wrote about the photo yesterday.)
“While it would have been moving and worthwhile to see both presidents in a front-page photograph,” Sullivan concluded, “I see no evidence of politics in the handling or presentation of the photo.” We’re sure this will settle it.
View the photo as Mills took it Saturday below:
President Obama walks across The Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, Alabama on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday pic.twitter.com/rtIlVRgW0W
— Doug Mills (@dougmillsnyt) March 7, 2015
[h/t New York Times]
[Image via Doug Mills]
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