The following photo has been making its way around the Web over the last two days, purporting to prove anti-Bush or anti-conservative bias on the part of The New York Times:
The photo — from Conservative News Today — allegedly shows the original Times photo from Saturday’s march and how it was cropped. But was it. How do we know, for instance, that the Conservative News Daily photo is actually the photo the Times cropped? Where did this website get the photo?
The Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, weighed in on the “crop” this morning:
I asked The Times’s ranking photo editor, Michele McNally, about the photo this morning.“There was no crop,” she said. “This was the photo as we received it.”
She added that the broader photo, which was not sent to the Times until after the photo ran on Sunday, was technically inferior:
Ms. McNally showed me the photograph taken with the wide-angle lens that Mr. Mills sent to the photo desk on Sunday after the protests began.“Technically, it’s a bad picture, and he didn’t even send it,” she said. President Bush “was totally overexposed,” she said. The photograph that was published is compositionally strong and “it has impact.”The explanation and reasoning by Mr. Mills and Ms. McNally make sense to me.While it would have been moving and worthwhile to see both presidents in a front-page photograph, I see no evidence of politics in the handling or presentation of the photo.
But don’t take her word for it. Look at the two photos one after the other, Times first and then the “cropped” version:
First, notice the angles. They are different — meaning the photos were not taken from the same vantage point, meaning that they are not the same photo. Or that’s my reading of it anyway. Feel free to prove me wrong
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Hank Kalet 