What's not to like about a picture of a cute kitty cat?
It depends on who you talk to, I guess.
When Associated Press photographer Ben Margot saw a police officer leaning over to pet a cat Tuesday in Oakland, Calif., he snapped the picture. A confrontation between police and Occupy Oakland protesters was building up, and the picture captured a quiet moment that was part of the larger scene in Oakland that day.
So the Washington Post ran the picture with a story about Occupy Wall Street-inspired protests. Later on, the scene in Oakland got violent. The story got updated, but the picture didn't.
So readers were treated to a picture of a cop petting a kit-cat on a story that began, "Police in riot gear fired tear gas and bean bags ..."
And the kit-, so to speak, hit the fan.
"It's amazing that Oakland PD managed to disperse the Occupy Oakland crowd solely by petting kittens," tweeted on reader.
"Not teargassing a soul!" tweeted another.
Both of them, by the way, write for competing publications in Washington.
You can read about it - and see the cute kitty - by clicking on this link. Was the Post out of line? Should they have paid more attention to the picture that ran with the story? [I can tell you from personal experience, a lot of newspaper editors don't even look at the pictures.] Or do some of the Washington Post's readers need to get a life?
A weblog for Pete Ellertsen's mass communications students at Benedictine University Springfield.
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About Me
- Pete
- Springfield (Ill.), United States
- I'm a retired English, journalism and cultural studies teacher at Springfield College in Illinois (acquired by Benedictine University and subsequently closed). I coordinate jam sessions for the "Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music" at Clayville Historic Site and the Prairieland Strings dulcimer club, and I sing in the choir and the contemporary praise team at Peace Lutheran Church in Springfield. On Hogfiddle I post links and video clips for our sessions and workshops on the mountain dulcimer (a.k.a. "hog fiddle"), as well as research notes on folklore and cultural studies, hymnody and traditional Anglo-Celtic and Scandinavian music. I also posted assignments and readings in my interdisciplinary humanities classes. The Mackerel Wrapper (now on hiatus), carried assignments and readings for my mass comm. students. I started teaching b/log when I chaired SCI-Benedictine's assessment committee, and reopened it as the privatization of public schools grew increasingly troubling and closer to home.
5 comments:
The picture is very confusing. It seems as if the are making light of the bigger picture. A violent out break of tear-gas, night sticks, and tasers rages through the streets, but this officer is petting a innocent kitty; not to be confused with the rest of her co-workers involoved in the violence. Maybe they were trying to prove there was a reason for the outbreak and that the police officers weren't the bad guys. But this only confused the readers. Plus, readers would rather read about the cops being involoved in violnce than cops petting kittens.
i dont think that it was a good picture to illustrate the story with but it is a very good picture displaying a cop not doing anything. in such a crazy situation i think it looks really bad on their part with one of their officers peting a cat. the picture wasnt out of line just because it showed a cop doing nothing it wasnt a good pic because it didnt convey the story very well
Thanks for posting. I think you're both right - the pix didn't work with the story anymore after the police used tear gas, for the reasons you mention. I can see how it happened, especially with the time difference between California and Washington, D.C., but they should have gone back and looked at the pix after the story changed.
My alltime favorite was a little weekly back in Tennessee that got the captions of a wedding picture and a girl whose horse won a statewide 4-H Club contest mixed up, so it looked like people were marrying their horses in that county. But I doubt that the bride, the groom and the 4-H kid thought it was as funny as I did!
The picture can be very misleading if you don't read the article. It gives the reader the idea of a peaceful protest, when in fact protestors are getting tazed and tear-gassed. This does show a side that the police officers weren't neccesarrily looking for a fight. It started out peacefully, and ended badly, as many protests do. I think some people read too much into it.
Maybe editors need to start looking at the pictures that run with stories because this one was really bad considering the situation.
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