Photos of presidential speeches to be captured in real time

Source: The Washington Post

The White House and news photographers have agreed to a new plan for shooting presidential speeches.

Out: staged, after-the-fact photo ops. In: a single photojournalist, who will be permitted to snap the president’s picture as he addresses the nation.

The agreement, hammered out quietly last week between the White House’s press office and the White House Correspondents’ Association, ends the long-standing but little-known practice of presidents posing for news photos after making important announcements. The images were then passed off in newspapers and on Web sites as photos taken during the speech rather than the re-creations they actually were.

Some journalists questioned the practice after President Obama announced late in the evening on May 1 that U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden. Photos of the president that were published soon after seemed to show him in mid-speech — but were, in fact, staged just after it to accommodate news photographers who were banned from the East Room during the actual event.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/photos-of-presidential-speeches-to-be-captured-in-real-time/2011/05/31/AGdHPhFH_story.html

Time for photographers to drop the excuses, and their 20th Century tech, and for the White House to do it too.

Of course, if the President was giving his speech in a cave, or morons continue to use noisy "shutters" and "flashes", I can see how it might be a distraction, but both problems have easy solutions... give speeches in room light, and dump photographers stuck 50 years in the past.