Incredibly - More Fake Media. Holy. Shit.

Just When You’d Thought You’ve Seen Enough Fake Media…

From the White House that’s brought you fake news stories, fake journalists, fake town hall meetings, fake Q&A’s with the troops, fake White House Press Corps reporters and lest we forget, fake turkeys, we now have the latest: fake media photos!

That’s right folks. The same Bush administration that has fed you more marketing bullshit than a Superbowl Sunday is now handing out fake photos of events closed to White House photographers.

“What’s the problem with this?” some of you Right-wing, freedom of the press hating, spying on Americans supporting, smaller government begging hypocritical Republicans might ask?

The press corps job is to document the President naturally, in real settings doing real things, and release those real photos to the real public, thus making real impressions. If you are constantly letting the Bush administration decide which pre-ordained, filtered photos are passed to the American public, then you don’t have actual journalism – you have a PR campaign.

Oh, and for the “Clinton-did-it-too” crowd (the same reasoning I used when I was about 5, which today Republicans like to use in order to justify Bush administration behavior), the Bush administration has been doing this at a rate almost 10 times that of the previous administration.

Here’s more:

"They average about two per week," said Susan Walsh, an AP photojournalist and president of the White House News Photographers Association, after directing that review. "The White House staff photographer's role is to document the president.
They have now crossed the line and become public relations photographers for the administration."

"Any handout restricts coverage by the press," said Dennis Brack of Black Star Publications, who has photographed each president since LBJ. "It curtails our access to events we should be covering with an independent eye and it fools the American public into thinking they are news pictures when they are really public relations pictures…”

…she cited some recent events, such as a Bush visit to a Smithsonian Institution museum and the re-signing of the Americans With Disabilities Act, that were restricted for no apparent reason.

..the opposition to White House-manufactured images is not just a press access issue, photographers contend. They point out the power such an arrangement gives the White House to literally control news.Although AP, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse were allowed to photograph Bush as he looked out the window at the Gulf Coast ruins, a White House handout photo of him at that moment was also released and used by at least three major newspapers, she said.

Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan did not return several calls seeking comment...

Read on here.