The Obama family on sunday, minus daughter Malia
We can confirm that Malia Obama is safe and was never in danger.”
That’s what a spokeswoman for the first lady, Michelle Obama, said on Tuesday, shortly after an earthquake struck central and southern Mexico, where her 13-year-old daughter, Malia, is visiting with a school group. Jackie Calmes quoted the spokeswoman’s statement on The Caucus blog this afternoon.
Normally there would have been no such statement, since major media outlets in the United States have generally abstained from covering the activities of the Obama children when their parents are not present. They did the same for the children of past presidents; it’s part of a longstanding, informal pact between the White House and the press corps that covers it.
Even with the advent of the Internet, the informal understanding has held up relatively well, according to White House correspondents. Wire service photographers and network news videographers usually don’t point their cameras at the children when they are present, rendering them more or less invisible — again, except when they appear in public with their parents.
It was a photograph, in fact, of President Obama and Mrs. Obama with their daughter Sasha, but without Malia, that initially attracted some attention on Sunday. Several Web sites, in a breach of that past practice, published news articles attributed to the international news wire Agence France-Presse about Malia’s trip, but on Monday those started disappearing, as the sites agreed to the White House’s requests for privacy.
Politico, whose media reporter wrote a blog post about the unpublished articles, subsequently removed some details from that blog post, BuzzFeed noted. “After some internal discussions and conversations with the White House, we adjusted the post for security reasons,” Politico’s White House editor, Rachel Smolkin, told BuzzFeed.
In the White House’s view, photos, videos and descriptions of the president’s children at play — be it outside their residence or on a school trip — have no vital news interest and inhibit privacy and security.
In the statement on Tuesday, the spokeswoman for Mrs. Obama said, “We would reiterate our request that the media respect the privacy and security of the Obama children and not report on or photograph the girls when they are not with their parents.”
Nevertheless, some Web sites that traffic in anti-administration opinions seized on the 13-year-old’s trip and on the disappearance of reports about it on Tuesday, accusing the child of a vacation at taxpayers’ expense and the White House of a cover-up. Others on those very same Web sites, though, rebuffed the cover-up talk.
When a thread on the conservative bulletin board Free Republic was started titled “Obama’s daughter spends springbreak in Mexico,” a moderator pulled the thread down and wrote, “Leave the kids alone.”
NEW YORK TIMES
No comments:
Post a Comment