When White House Photos Are ‘Visual Press Releases\'

For Doug Mills â€" the longtime White House photographer for The Times â€" what happened on Veterans Day was more than annoying. It was wrong.

He and other Washington journalists had been hearing that the oldest World War II veteran alive was coming to Washington to commemorate the occasion. But they weren't sure just what the 107-year-old Richard Overton's precise coordinates would be.

As it turned out, he had a private breakfast with President Obama â€" undoubtedly a newsworthy event as well as one that cried out to be photographed.

But press photographers were not allowed to take that photo. Only Pete Souza, the government-employed photographer who works on the White House staff, was there. His photo of the president and the old soldier went out on Twitter and then was posted on Flickr, and from there the world could see it and distribute it.

“As a journalist, you feel you should be there, but we're shut out,” Mr. Mills told me this week. “It's very frustrating.”

Increasingly, the Obama administration â€" yes, the most transparent administration ever, according to its early promises â€" has kept press photographers out of the kinds of events they used to be able to cover. Instead, the administration has relied on its own staff and social media to spread images worldwide.

That those images are exactly what the president's staff would like them to be is no surprise. That's what staff photographers are paid to do.

“It's all about controlling the image and putting the president in the best light,” Mr. Mills said. There's no chance for a gaffe, or a bad hair day, or a sour expression, or much spontaneity when photographs are subject to approval by the presidential gatekeepers.

“There's been a kind of creep, where even on innocuous events, the White House is calling it private and then pushing out a picture that's taken by their own photographer,” said Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, who has 40 years' experience as a photojournalist. (It is understood, he said, that acceptable photographic access would mean using “a tight pool” of three to five press photographers who would then share their images with other photojournalists.)

Press photographers, and the news organizations they work for, are fighting back. As Mark Landler of The Times reported on Nov. 30:

In a letter two weeks ago to the press secretary, Jay Carney, the White House Correspondents' Association and other organizations, including The New York Times, protested that the White House routinely excluded news photographers from sessions with the president and then released photographs of the events, usually taken by Mr. Souza.

“You are, in effect, replacing independent journalism with visual press releases,” said the letter, which criticized the White House's policy as “an arbitrary restraint and unwarranted interference in legitimate news-gathering activities.”

And, in the past few weeks, some news organizations have taken another step â€" they have banned the use of these official photographs in their publications. Gannett and its flagship paper, USA Today; McClatchy; and The Associated Press are among them. (In each case, the organizations allow for a very narrow exception â€" a rare case like the famous photograph from the night of the Osama bin Laden raid.)

Santiago Lyon, A.P.'s director of photography, described to The Washington Post's Paul Farhi “the trend” of more limitations on photographers since President Obama took office.

The White House, for example, did not allow photographers to shoot a meeting between the president and Malala Yousafzai. She is the Pakistani teenager who was shot by the Taliban for her statements in support of education for girls.

The Times has not changed its unwritten policy, which is to use such photographs only rarely, in certain unusual situations â€" where access is impossible because of security concerns, where the photo is a referenced part of the story or in photos of historical importance â€" according to Michele McNally, the assistant managing editor for photography.

I found seven instances in which White House “handout” photographs were used in The Times in 2013 â€" including a photograph of the president shooting skeet the previous year at Camp David and one of him sharing a laugh with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over lunch outside the Oval Office. Another shows the president discussing options for Syria in the Oval Office.

The Times signed the letter to Mr. Carney and was represented on an earlier conference call to plan strategy. But it could go further and be a more dominant voice on this issue. A written restatement of its policy and a more strictly enforced ban on such pictures would send a strong message and help the cause.

Why should this concern readers? Does it really matter what the source of the photograph is?

Here's why it matters: First, in the age of digital manipulation, political photographs can be tampered with all too easily. Remember the congresswomen on the steps of the Capitol, with some members' pictures inserted later because they couldn't be there? (There is no suggestion that Mr. Souza or his White House colleagues have done anything like that.)

Second, controlling the image is just another way of controlling the news. To put it bluntly, White House “handout” photographs are closer to propaganda than to journalism.

That may seem overstated to some, but not to Doug Mills.

“I think every newspaper should have a ban on it,” he said.  He's right, and I agree.

Updated, 11:24 a.m. | A.P.'s executive editor, Kathleen Carroll, wrote to me today to note that this is not a new policy for her organization. In fact, the A.P. has been waging this fight for a long time. She wrote, in part:

It is the A.P.'s longstanding policy not to accept or distribute handout photos when we believe the event should have been open to news coverage. In this administration, that fight goes back to Day One, when the do-over swearing in was photographed only by the official White House photographer. That was not acceptable to us. There were thousands of independent images made of the muffed oath, only one lone government-sanctioned image of the Take Two version.

Correction| An earlier version of this post referred to a photo taken in the Situation Room the night of the bin Laden raid. It actually was taken in an adjacent conference room at the White House.