This is the official White House photo that they wanted to world to see following the successful effort to get Osama bin Laden. Yeah, it is sort of just like in the movies with the whole crew lined up watching the drama unfold. Actually, Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, probably shouldn’t have been included in the meeting, but it shows something that she was there. Out going Secretary of Defense Gates might have been expected to be at the Pentagon, but it is not surprising he was at the White House either.

One thing that strikes me about the photo is that it is not like the movies in terms of the presentation. It is not in some war room with a huge conference table and everyone arranged carefully around it. The situation has an ad libbed appearance of a meeting quickly thrown together. Reports have said they were getting live information from the scene in Pakistan, so the moment by moment drama must have been highly compelling.

One reason it doesn’t look more like the movies, believe it or not, is that filmmakers have bigger budgets to set up this kind of thing than the government does. Everything in government has to be budgeted, approved, voted on and channeled properly in order for something to be built. A filmmaker gets his 60 million dollars and does what he wants. It doesn’t actually work that way in your nation’s capital. It is nice to imagine a grand room with blinking lights and images pouring in from around the world, but who’s going to pay for it? When government wants to do something, there are Congressional Committees opposing it and people shouting that it can’t be afforded.

Another interesting point is that the president is not at the center of the photo nor at the center of the scene. (Hollywood would never allow that.) Various reports have indicated that Obama is rather humble about being president and sometimes finds the deference in the way he is treated off putting. Here, he looks like a guy who is involved and deeply concerned, but not someone who always has to be in the captain’s chair. (The military guy actually in the captain’s chair appears to be orchestrating the show on a series of laptops for the rest of the crowd.) I suspect what happened is that the presenter needed to be in the big chair and everyone else just took up whatever position was available. Obama looks a bit crunched in the corner, but so what?

There is no doubt that it was a difficult and highly risky job and everyone in the photo looks completely engaged. What is it about those helicopters crashing? For anyone with a long memory or a strong interest in recent history, it brings to mind the helicopter crash (much worse) that ended president Carter’s efforts to rescue hostages in Iran in the late 1970s. The fortunate thing is that the problems with the helicopter this time did not crash the mission itself.

As for putting out this picture, the Obama White House is now fully involved in providing its own version and supplement to traditional news coverage. Move over, newspapers and networks, the White House wants to do your job in their way. The lines of traditional media outlets and official media output are going to get very blurry in the years ahead.

Doug Terry

5.3.11

The TerryReport was one of the first sources to do a detailed analysis of the White House photo. The image has since become a sensation. Thousands of other sites have followed with comments. It seems to get a little silly at times, but the picture is important and so is the way you see it. There is a lengthy commentary posted on CNN. Com, linked in the blue box below:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/05/iconic.photo/index.html?hpt=C1