Daniel Greenfield's article: An Obama Photo Worth a Thousand Lies |
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Posted: 14 Mar 2018 05:09 PM PDT
When a a major Obama news photo story broke,
the media was there to capture it. A 2-year-old girl was photographed looking
at a really terrible painting of Michelle Obama.
 "'A
moment of awe': Photo of little girl captivated by Michelle Obama portrait
goes viral," Washington Post cheered.
"Little girl awestruck by Michelle Obama's portrait believes she's a
queen," urgently reported CNN. The sum total of this story is that a
little girl looked at a portrait of Michelle.Eat your heart out, North Korea. Our fake news propaganda is even tackier than yours.
Recently, a photo was released of Barack Obama
meeting with Louis Farrakhan. The photo had been
suppressed all these years to protect Obama’s career. Farrakhan was the
racist leader of a hate group who had praised Hitler and described Jews as
“satanic”. And yet he had met with the future president at a Congressional
Black Caucus event. A CBC member, Rep. Danny
Davis, had even praised Farrakhan.
You might think there’s a story in all that.
And you would be wrong.
There isn’t a single Washington
Post story on the photo. Not one. The same paper that
believed its readers needed to be informed that a little girl had been
photographed looking at a bad painting of Michelle Obama hasn’t found the
time to report on the cover up of a meeting between top Democrats, including
a future president, and the leader of a racist hate group that had once
allied with the KKK.
It’s not that the Washington Post can’t
report on Farrakhan. Or use Farrakhan to attack a president.
In ’15, the Post ran, “The
bigotry of Trump and Farrakhan” and in ’16, “Why the Nation of Islam is
praising Donald Trump”. Its stories about Obama and Farrakhan insist that the
two men hate each other. A ’15 piece even attempted to link Farrakhan to
Clarence Thomas, instead of Obama.
The Washington Post can
report on Farrakhan when attacking Republicans. It just won’t report on
Obama’s links to Farrakhan. Neither will CNN. The only mentions of the photo
on its site come from CNN personalities like Jake Tapper and Michael
Smerconish. CNN found the time to report on a
photo of a dog’s ear that it claimed looked like
President Trump. But not on a photo of Obama and Farrakhan.
I reached out to Washington Post editor
Marty Baron and media columnist Margaret Sullivan asking them to explain
their paper’s embargo on the Farrakhan photo. There has been no
response.
Instead of coverage, the Washington
Post has engaged in a cover up.
Ever since Obama left office, the media has
reported on all sorts of photos of him. None of these photos are actually
significant. The stories are puff pieces of the kind you expect to find in
North Korea.
The New York Times, the Washington
Post, Time and other
media outlets found it vital over the years to report on a photo of a boy
patting Obama on the head. They continued revisiting the photo even after
Obama was out of office. And then ran stories of the boy looking back on that
“historic” head patting.
If only they had done a fraction of the
research on a photo of Obama meeting with a hate group leader at an official
Democrat function as they did on a photo of him mugging for the camera with a
little boy.
"Photo speaks volumes about Obama and
race," is how the Washington Post wrote
it up. Does the photo of Obama with a black nationalist racist leader who
praised Hitler say anything about race?
Nah.
The Washington Post dedicated yet another
piece to yet another photo of Obama and a little
boy. “A touched cheek and hope for the future,” it declared. CNN, for
its part, ran, "Obama reacts to child's White House tantrum." The
media finds staged photos of its beloved leader as newsworthy as any state
propaganda agency in a dictatorship. But actual newsworthy photos get buried
out back at midnight.
The propaganda photos were mostly taken by
Pete Souza, Obama's Official White House Photographer. Souza had been brought
on board to do his best Leni Riefenstahl shtick since 2005 when the
Chicago Tribune assigned him to "document" Obama's
first year in the Senate. That turned into a book, “The Rise of Barack
Obama”, released just in time for the full launch of the Obama presidential
campaign.
New senators don't normally have a former
White House photog following them around. But Obama was being groomed for the
White House even before he walked into the Senate. Souza was selected for the
Chief Photo Propagandist gig by the Tribune’s Jeff Zeleny in ’04. Zeleny
later became
infamous, after switching to the New York Times, for
asking Obama how “enchanted” he was by his first 100 days.
Obama wasn’t enchanted, but the media was. It
was the Chicago Tribune whose dirty trick of
unsealing the divorce records of Obama’s Republican opponent got him to the
Senate. And having used dirty tricks to get him there, it funded his
hagiography without reporting it as a campaign contribution.
Behind the cute propaganda photos was a darker
truth.
The White House Correspondents Association protested the
ban on independent photographers. “Journalists are
routinely being denied the right to photograph or videotape the President
while he is performing his official duties,” they complained.
While President Trump allows the media to photograph
him as much as its shutterbugs want, Obama’s official
image was a carefully manufactured collaboration made to appear casual and
natural.
Instead of risking unflattering shots, Obama
Inc. just tossed out propaganda pics from Pete. But photojournalists also
participated in staging photos of Obama. During his live speeches, still
photographers would be kept out to avoid any unflattering pictures of the
beloved leader moving his simpering lips. Then when he had finished speaking,
the photogs were allowed in to take posed shots of Obama pretending to speak
even while he was saying nothing.
That is a good summary of how the media
covered Obama and how it’s still covering for him.
The media found the time to turn 5 different
photos of Obama posing with kids into stories. It pretended that some of
these photos, taken with African-American children, said something about
race.
No, they didn’t.
The photo that does say something about race
is the one of Obama smiling next to a notorious racist. And how many other
photos like it remain buried? How many are locked away in a vault somewhere,
like the Los Angeles Times’ infamous Obama Khalidi
tape, awaiting the day when they no longer matter?
The Obama Farrakhan photo can’t be locked up
again. But mention of it can be locked away by the media which will instead
urgently report on a photo of a little girl looking at a portrait of Michelle
Obama. Or a photo of a little boy patting Obama on the head. Or Obama with a
baby.
Just like the countless propaganda photos and
posters of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Kim Jong-un with the kiddies. Here’s an adorable photo of
the North Korean dictator at an orphanage. You won’t believe how cute this
photo of Stalin holding a little girl is. Especially once you find out he murdered her parents. This snap of Hitler with
the daughter of his chief propagandist, who was murdered
when Hitler’s doctor forced cyanide tablets into her mouth, was meant to make
people think he wasn’t a monster.
And this shot of Saddam Hussein ruffling the
hair of a 5-year-old
British hostage will melt your heart.
There’s a reason that dictators are often
depicted with children. Yes, it makes them seem cuddlier. But it’s also the
essence of tyranny for the servants of the people to play the parents of the
people instead.
The people are their children who need to be
told what to do and disciplined when we misbehave.
Soviet propaganda named Stalin, “Father of
Nations”. (When he invaded other nations, he was just exercising his parental
prerogatives.) Hitler was the “Father of the German People”. And Obama?
“The President of the United States is, you
know, our boss. But also, you know, the president and the first lady are kind
of like the mom and the dad of the country. And when your dad says something,
you listen, “ said Chris Rock, at a gun control
rally back in the Obama era.
And you don’t need to ask why daddy is
kissing Louis Farrakhan. It’s none of your business.
That’s what the media is really telling us.
And it’s telling that we have the same media as Russia, China and North Korea
that runs propaganda photos of its beloved leader while smearing his
opponents.
The media’s Obama kiddy photos and its sullen
silence about the Farrakhan photos do tell us something. They tell us that we
narrowly survived a cult of personality. And that we aren’t out of the woods
yet.
The dictator is out of the White House. But
his lackeys still control the news.
Change will come when the Berlin Wall of
silence about the Farrakhan photo falls and when the Fuhrerbunker in which
the Khalidi tape is buried pops open. We’ll know when the spying, the lies,
the dirty tricks of the tyranny under which we’re still living come crashing
down around its heads.
And then we’ll know
that we are finally free.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman
Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the
Center's Front Page
Magazine.
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