Mixed signals

Well, we all know who(m) to blame for that development, don't we? Let's ask the commenters:

Nice photo.  Where did he go next in his million dollar limo? How many body guards did he have around him?  Or what high class resort did he and michelle vacation too next?  Which high class hotel did he buy out the floors for, for protection purposes of course?  How many jets were needed to hold his minions to get this photo.?  In other words how much did this photo cost the tax payers of this country?

Oh, where would we be without this President? Where would we be, he cares about America so very much.?

Barry hob knobs with the filthy rich union bosses at Martha's vinyard while America sinks deeper into poverty. Sick fukk

I hope you at least learned a lesson that you should have learned years ago. Judge people by their actions not there words/speeches. He had no experience and still has no experience.

"Oh dank you for da food Mr. President, dank you, dank you. Now where's da line for da free money?"

You white boys and girls got scr--d the country is gone,What are you going to do , nothing

this is all under the regime of the boy king..we are a broke nation.. all because of this sandmonkey...so blame some one that has been gone for 3 and a half years  when the boy king has had 3 and a half years to sink us so far down that their is no hope we can come out of this in our life times

You can see why it's an irresistible combination for the top of the Fox page (though it was rather quickly nudged down to second place,* with a photo of the line at a job fair in Atlanta last month replacing the Obama shot). And it probably got to where it was without a lot of prompting from the glass offices. As Warren Breed noted in "Social Control in the News Room" (1955), people rarely have to be told directly what a story ought to look like. They learn from what lands on the front page, what happens to their own copy, who yells what at whom across the room, what befalls an editor who fails to give a sacred cow its due, and all the other stuff that goes on in day-to-day life.

Another interesting bit of evidence is -- golly, wonder what the cousins over at National Review ("Strange facts about America's 'poor'") are saying about this development:

This morning, the Census Bureau announced that a record 46.2 million, or one in seven Americans, lived in poverty last year. ... But there is a wide chasm between the public’s concept of poverty and “poverty” as it is defined by the Census Bureau.

... Why the disconnect? The answer: Public perception of poverty in the U.S. is governed by the mainstream media, which invariably depicts the Census Bureau’s tens of millions of poor people as chronically hungry and malnourished, homeless or barely hanging on in overcrowded, dilapidated housing.

The strategy of the media is to take the least fortunate 3 percent or 4 percent of the poor and portray their condition as representative of most poor Americans. While we must have compassion for those who are truly homeless or without food, they are far from typical among the poor.

How do the poor live? For starters, a poor child in American is far more likely to have a widescreen plasma television, cable or satellite TV, a computer and an Xbox or TiVo in his home than he is to be hungry.

Silly rabbit! Poverty isn't an Obama story! It's a story about how the conniving media are plotting to make you forget that the first thing Those People do with their money is buy a Cadillac wide-screen TV. No surprise, then that the people on the ground knew right away what the story "should" look like. The surprise -- and what I'd say is the better indicator of someone reaching down from on high -- is how quickly Fox realized that it had gotten the party line backwards on the front page.

Breed's on the reading list for Wednesday night (along with Gaye Tuchman and James Carey). Advance comments welcome.

* UPDATE: As of this writing (5:38p Eastern), it's been demoted to a refer under the #2 story.