On Sunday, conservatives on Twitter noticed something about the front page of the New York Times: former President George W. Bush was missing.
Many, including the Right Scoop blog, accused the Grey Lady of "cropping" Bush out of the photo from Saturday's 50th anniversary commemoration of the "Bloody Sunday" march in Selma, Alabama.
Both Bush and President Barack Obama — who was featured front and center in the Times' Sunday cover photo — attended the ceremony and took part in a commemorative walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
But there's a problem with the "cropping" narrative: No cropping actually took place.
“There was no crop,” Times' photo editor Michele McNally said. “This was the photo as we received it.”
The Times photographer on the scene said he did get a picture that showed both Bush and Obama in the march but that he discarded it because it was overexposed.
The photographer, Doug Mills, said that the fact that Bush and Obama were walking far apart, plus the fact that Bush was in sunlight and Obama was in the shade, combined to make the picture with both presidents in it not very good.
Mills detailed the conditions to photo editors:
Just so you know … at the time the photo was taken, I was using a 70-200 long zoom lens. I also had a remote camera with a wide-angle lens attached to the side of the truck that took a photo at the just about the exact moment as the tighter one. As you can see, Bush was in the bright sunlight. I did not even send this frame because it’s very wide and super busy and Bush is super-overexposed because he was in the sun and Obama and the others are in the shade.
“Technically, it’s a bad picture, and [Mills] didn’t even send it,” McNally said, reiterating that Bush “was totally overexposed” and that the photo the Times wound up using was compositionally solid and “it has impact.”
In a blog post Monday, Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan defended the paper's choice of picture.
"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," she wrote.
—
Follow Zach Noble (@thezachnoble) on Twitter
