White House: No more photo re-enactments

[Newsjock]

Source: Associated Press

The White House said it is ending its long-running practice of having presidents re-enact televised speeches for news photographers following major addresses to the country, a little-known arrangement that fed suggestions of fakery when Barack Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden.

After Obama's live, late-evening address from the East Room of the White House on May 1, five photographers were ushered in to shoot pictures as the president stood at the podium and re-read a few lines of his speech — a practice that news organizations have protested for years.

Even though The Associated Press and other news outlets said in captions to the photos that they were taken after the president delivered his address, many people who saw them may have assumed they depicted the speech itself. That raised questions of whether news organizations were staging an event.

... The AP, in the photo captions transmitted with pictures shot by Pablo Martinez Monsivais, said: "President Barack Obama reads his statement to photographers after making a televised statement" on bin Laden's death. Despite that, a survey by the journalism think tank Poynter Institute found that 30 of 50 newspaper front pages that used an Obama photo from the speech "implied or strongly suggested it was an image of the live address."

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110512/ap_on_re_us/us_obama_photographers