November 1, 2009

DOWD ON DOVER. Maureen Dowd offers a keen observation in today’s Times.

She points out that some Republicans have criticized Barack Obama for allowing photographers to catch him during a somber visit to Dover Air Force Base, where he met the arriving coffins of 18 American soldiers recently killed in battle; Dowd notes that the ever present Liz Cheney even went so far as to say, on Fox News radio, “I think that what President Bush used to do is do it without the cameras.”

Uh, not so fast. As Dowd remarks (and as I mention in Watching the World Change), Bush never once attended a funeral for an Afghan or Iraq War G.I., never once visited Dover – and, during his tenure, forbid all press photography of arriving coffins. In Dowd’s view, Bush, through the photo-ban, was “trying to airbrush the evidence that the wars he started were not the cakewalks he had promised.”

GAINES AGAINST THE GRAIN. And check out this blogpost by Jim Gaines, the only man to edit People, Life, and Time (now engaged as editor-in-chief at the visually daring online magazine, Flyp). He argues that photojournalism didn’t necessarily go the way of its compatriots roll film and silver halide. Instead, he finds a surprising silver lining for photojournalists amid the thunderheads of the digital revolution.