It is absurd — dangerous even — to claim reporters “root for a side,” according to certain members of the press.
Also, Sen. Elizabeth Warren is kind of like Frederick Douglass. Because … they both appear in photographs. Or something.
The Washington Post became the target of much-deserved mockery this weekend after social media users noticed a Sept. 18 article titled, “Frederick Douglass photos smashed stereotypes. Could Elizabeth Warren selfies do the same?”
That headline is not meant to be ironic. It is 100% earnest.
The Post article, written by reporter Hannah Natanson, begins with these lines:
Frederick Douglass — a black man campaigning for the abolition of slavery in the 1840s — appears alone in almost every photograph, staring down the camera in isolated, thoughtful splendor. Elizabeth Warren — a white woman campaigning for the presidency in 2019 — features today in countless iPhone photos and Instagram feeds, her arm around voter after voter, always bearing the same wide grin.
The two are separated by race, gender and more than 100 years of history that forged an America that would probably be unrecognizable to Douglass. Still, experts say, their use of photography collapses the distance: Douglass sat for scores of pictures to normalize the idea of black excellence and equality, and Warren’s thousands of selfies with supporters could do the same for a female president.
The article continues, finally reaching the point where it links Warren to Douglass:
As Yale professor David Blight writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” Douglass used the photos — in which he appeared elegantly dressed, his hair perfectly arranged — as “a means of spreading influence.” Douglass created “for a wide audience successive images of the intelligent, dignified black man,” Blight argues, in a larger bid to convince the country that black inferiority was a racist myth.
He was up against more than myth. Born into slavery, Douglass taught himself to read and write (both forbidden activities), escaped enslavement at age 20 and forged a career as the most accomplished orator of America’s abolition movement — and possibly in the entire country. He lived to see slavery abolished at the end of the Civil War but continued to fight against the country’s racist and inhumane treatment of African Americans all his life.
Although in a vastly different context, Warren is today confronting another harmful myth, experts said: that a woman is not presidential and does not belong in the Oval Office. Over the course of her campaign, she’s developed a similar strategy to fight back. At the end of every rally, Warren — one of three front-runners in the Democratic race, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll — stays behind to pose for pictures with pretty much every supporter who asks.
Okay, that’s enough of that. Everyone out of the pool.
“If democratizing, Warren’s selfies also assert a very specific identity, experts said — just as Douglass’s photos did,” the story gushes on, adding, “Warren’s photos — especially those in which she poses alongside young girls — are reshaping American perceptions of who can serve as president, experts said.”
The article says also in its second-to-final paragraph, “Even if she loses, Bauer said, Warren has already accomplished something important. She’s already left behind an influential legacy — captured in the thousands of smiling photos stored in thousands of iPhones across the nation.”
The funny thing is: There actually is something interesting to be said for Warren’s “selfie” strategy. The Post’s Sept. 22 analysis just isn’t it.
“Warren is 70 years old but looks 60,” writes National Review’s John McCormack. “The ‘selfies,’ along with her penchant for jogging toward the stage at campaign events, help give her a youthful image compared with Joe Biden, who is 76 but looks 80, and Bernie Sanders, who is 78 but looks 90.”
He adds, “The photos also help combat the perception that the former professor has a cold, professorial demeanor.”
All true!
That is an interesting and shrewd analysis, and it is all that really needs to be said about the Warren “selfie” strategy. Only a person “rooting for a side” would try to tie something as common and unremarkable as a presidential candidate posing for photos to Frederick Douglass. Seriously.
