Wall Street Journal Takes on Hand Out Photos

There has been a long-running debate between the Washington press corp and the current presidential administration about photo access. The short version: the White House hired an accomplished photojournalist, Pete Souza, to be the president’s photographer and has been much more active in releasing photos from Souza to the press and public. Which seems like a good thing, except they have also severely restricted the number of events the free press has access to. Many of the images the populace sees of the president are not journalistic images, they are PR handout photos.

The Wall Street Journal decided to have a little fun and created a one-play game where readers can guess which of five images is a PR handout photo and which are actual acts of journalism.

They only did it with one event, but I’d love to see a whole string of these – that would be really telling.