Oh, That Liberal Media

On the day a former President dies, the Washington Post strains to find the picture they feel best captures the man.

Their choice?

Yeah. Okay. A man handsome enough to have once been a movie actor. And the picture chosen for the frontpage of the WashPost website shows him apparently in a quaking rage and about to bite the head off a kitten.

The man spent 90% of his life smiling. But I guess the Washington Post's web-editor thought that a smiling Reagan would be just a little too pat. Better to show him as he really was, full of racist venom.

I never realized his teeth were somewhat bad. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the Washington Post makes this fact clear on the day of his death.

Thank you, Washington Post.

Update: Apparently re-loading the page brings up five or six different Reagan photos. There's some sort of cycling of the photos; loading the page at one time brings up a photo with him and Gorbachev, another time with him and Nancy, etc.

The other photos are not objectionable.

Fine. So this is not the only photo running on the front page. It was, however, the photo that loaded for me.

What the hell is the extraodinarily-unflattering photo doing in the cycle?

Update: Some readers object to my objection, stating that the photo shows his "resolve." I disagree; I think it makes him look angry and feral.

Context matters. If this photo were from when he was informed of the Pan Am 103 bombing, one could understand the anger.

But it wasn't taken after such an anger-provoking event. The caption was something like, "Reagan prepares for a radio address in 1988." That was it. No reason for anger.

I can't quote the caption verbatim, because the photo has now been taken out of the cycle. I reloaded fifty times and didn't see it. The fact that it has now been removed from the cycle would seem to be evidence that someone at the Post realized how inappropriate and partisan it was.

posted by Ace at 04:03 AM

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