This is an excerpt from my Substack newsletter, The News Angle, published on Friday 19th July 2024. Image: Time front cover. Photo: Evan Vucci © Associated Press
The AP photo
Of course, a massive media focus in the last week was on that photo of former President Donald Trump being bundled away by Secret Service agents, fist in the air, and with the American flag framed above the melee. What an extraordinary image. As we all now know, it was taken by Pulitzer prize-winning Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci.
In interviews, Evan explained how, just after the shooting, he had moved to a different position to get photos of Trump coming down from the stage, and decided to use his wide-angle lens. He was linked to a hotspot, so his photos were being fed back to his editors in real time.
The photo of the former President, surrounded by agents, was then used around the world, on front pages, in TV packages, and, of course, on social media. The image is more remarkable the longer that you look at it. There would have been many other photographers at the rally, professional and amateur, but only Evan managed to frame his picture with Trump’s bloodied face, his fist, the American flag, the security guards pressed up against him, all set against a sharp, clear blue sky. Each element of the photo supporting and enhancing the other elements. Each person and object in the photo conveying a story.
Tyler Austin Harper wrote in The Atlantic:
“The photograph… became immediately legendary. However you feel about the man at its center, it is undeniably one of the great compositions in US photographic history. The image of Trump, bloody with a raised fist, is destined to adorn T-shirts, magazine covers, full-page spreads in history books, campaign ads. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the photo is nearly perfect, one captured under extreme duress and that distills the essence of a man in all his contradictions.”
So, how did Evan get the picture?
Of course, luck played its part. He was in the right place, at the right time. But I’m convinced that the crucial aspect of an exceptional piece of professional work like this is the two decades of experience that Evan Vucci has notched up taking photos around the world in wars, conflicts and demonstrations. This experience will have kicked in and made Evan make a series of key decisions in a split-second – to move to the new spot, choose the right lens and camera settings, and then position himself to instinctively frame the picture to include the flag.
It reminds me of TV reporter Robert Moore’s award-winning coverage from inside the Capitol Building in 2021. Yes, Robert and his crew were there just at the right time, but he too has had a long career covering wars and disasters, and it was that experience, in my view, which melded together to give him the confidence and direction, instinctively and subconsciously, to tackle the story in the way that he did.
There’s been some excellent analysis and writing about the impact of the Trump photo. AP’s media writer David Bauder wrote:
“The New York Post ran the photo across the tabloid’s front page on Sunday with a headline describing the former president as ‘bloodied but unbowed’. Time magazine has put it on its cover… It all made one thing clear: after more than 175 years of photography, freezing a moment in time for posterity remains as powerful as recounting it in video — and, sometimes, even more so.”
And I loved Philip Kennicott’s description in The Washington Post:
“Vucci’s photo will create a reality more real than reality, transforming the chaos and messiness of a few moments of peril onstage in Pennsylvania into a surpassing icon of Trump’s courage, resolve and heroism.”
A ‘reality more real than reality’, a ‘surpassing icon’. Fitting descriptions of a truly amazing photo.
Breaking News
But how did the media cover the story of the shooting itself?
In the US there aren’t many bigger stories than an assassination attempt on an American president, past or present. I’m sure that thinking about how they would react to news of an assassination attempt is deeply embedded in the psyche of US newsrooms – even young journalists will surely have watched the video of Walter Cronkite breaking the news of Kennedy’s death, or the pictures of the shooting of Reagan.
In the UK, it’s always been the death of a royal that has set off the loudest newsroom alarm bells. In the US, it’s political assassinations.
And so American news teams, in print, online, TV and radio, will suddenly have had to move up a gear last Saturday when news broke of the shooting at the Trump rally.
An excellent summary of how the US TV media reacted was written by Poynter’s Senior Media Journalist Tom Jones on Monday of this week, describing it as “repetitive, but responsible”:
“All the networks cut into regularly scheduled programming almost immediately after the shots were fired, around 6:20 p.m. Eastern time. To their credit, the main networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — as well as cable news networks CNN, Fox News and MSNBC were responsible in their coverage, using careful language about what actually happened, but also describing the gravity of the situation.”
Of course, it happened at a weekend – when TV newsrooms have smaller teams, and, often, less experienced staff. I can remember that the British Queen Mother died unexpectedly on a Saturday in 2002. Her death was a massive story, and the announcement from Buckingham Palace put intense pressure on the ITV News weekend programme editor and newscaster, and the small duty production and news desk staff.
I was editor of ITV News at the time, but was away for the weekend, in Norfolk, on the east coast of England, when the news came out, and we needed to break into the ITV network to cover the story. My family still recall me talking into two phones at the same time – one to the ITV network to negotiate the schedule change, and the other a hotline into the studio control room. In the call to the control room, I remember pleading: “Get on air. Just get on air!”. They did, and we went on to be nominated for a TV award for our coverage of her death. But on that Saturday, it was far from easy…
Indeed, the veteran US media commentator Brian Stelter mentioned the weekend factor in the Poynter article about the Trump coverage. He said:
“Weekend newsroom crews deserve a big shoutout. Weekends can be a lonely, underappreciated, overstretched shift. The weekend crews at the networks all rose to the occasion. I was quite impressed by the rolling special reports on NBC, ABC and CBS.”
Although it was a weekend, at least all the US major networks had reporters and live camera teams at the rally in Pennsylvania. It was the weekend before the Republican convention, and Trump was about to announce his running mate.
From the UK perspective, the BBC’s reporter Gary O’Donoghue did particularly well carrying out a dramatic interview with an eyewitness, who had seen the gunman on the roof, and who had tried to alert the police. You can hear Gary’s account of the interview on this week’s BBC Media Show. He said:
“We were actually live when the shooting started, and we got on the ground… Once we got up and started interviewing people and the BBC output was rolling on the event, my producer Iona Hampson was grabbing people, pushing them in my direction. I was live on air talking and bringing them into shot, and talking to them.”
The Aftermath
The assassination attempt has inevitably led to a highly charged atmosphere amongst reporters, commentators, political staff, and politicians. Both sides in America’s highly polarised political scene blamed the other for saying things which might have encouraged the gunman. And, of course, there was what the UK Daily Mail described as an “avalanche” of conspiracy theories on social media about the shooting – not least that the Vucci photo had somehow been staged.
Oliver Darcy, in CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter, also wrote about the problems news organisations have faced this week in the aftermath of the shooting. He talked about how they need to be sensitive when describing a man who had just survived a traumatic assassination attempt, while at the same time continuing to be challenging and robust in their coverage. He said that “threading that needle will surely prove to be no easy task”.
Conclusion
Overall, US media seems to have reacted well on the actual day of the shooting. Responsible was the word used by some commentators to describe the TV coverage in particular. In the days that followed, it all returned to the more normal combative media battleground. There were even calls for media outlets to stop using the Vucci photo, on the grounds that it was too propagandistic, too supportive of the Trump campaign, too incendiary in the already heated American political discourse.
But on the day itself, TV News teams and, indeed, agency photojournalists, did what they were meant to do. A job well done.