Infuriating media trope: The "Obama Looking Downward" photo.
During the course of a speech or press conference involving the President, all possible angles and ordinary facial expressions will be photographed. So it's been a little...conspicuous...that practically since Barack Obama became a presidential candidate in 2008, the single most overwhelmingly-used image of his face in the media has been of him looking downward, head lowered, appearing weak and defeated.
Which is a bit, well, strange considering that when you watch actual video of these events he speaks in a normal tone, assertively and clearly, facing forward and addressing the audience as you would expect, and you'd practically have to be deliberately sifting through dozens to hundreds of images to find ones that are as negative as possible to use. It's gotten frankly cartoonish lately. The practice of showing Obama with head and eyes down has gotten so consistent in the media that you have to ask what the everloving fuck is going through the minds of these people making these editorial choices, because journalism seems to be pretty far down on their list of priorities.
It's gotten so egregious that these media outlets are starting to seem like they're taking some kind of prurient pleasure out of being so ridiculously propagandistic. Some of you will recognize instantly what I'm talking about, but if you don't, keep an eye out. Whenever you see an article on a news website about the President, pay attention to whatever photos if any they show in the banner headline.
For a while they seemed to be more enamored of the "Finger-wagging Obama" photos, I guess projecting their silly-ass right-wing feelings about the President as some kind of authoritarian figure despite his bending over backward to accommodate them. Now that the news is filled with foreign policy, they seem to have shifted gears back to promoting the "Obama as weakling" Big Lie through the cheapest available chicanery.
The fact that media are right-wing sockpuppets is hardly news in itself, but the blatantness of it - the mind-numbing obviousness and constant drumbeat of their tactics - really gets on my damn nerves. They love to just rub in your face that the truth plays no role in what they do. And it happens even in ostensibly "liberal" publications, such as the Guardian. Two articles within two days doing exactly this were the last straw for me:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/22/isis-gains-syria-pressure-west-robust
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/25/obama-ignored-syria-rise-of-isis-military-action
The entire media does this constantly, and it doesn't even matter whether there is some objective thematic reason for it. If something bad is happening, Downward Looking Obama visually announces that he is powerless to stop it. If something good is happening, Downward Looking Obama visually announces that he is sad that his nefarious schemes have been thwarted by the forces of righteousness. Who are these people that have been doing this for years, and what the hell is their problem?
(I'm now having fun in the Guardian comments section of one of those articles trying to keep a comment up criticizing their photo, but it keeps being removed - gotta love those right-honorable members of the "liberal media"
(Welp, now I'm pre-moderated on Guardian for reposting the criticism, so it won't get through anymore. Scumbags.)
(Guardian pulls a lot of shit, but it was tolerable because of some of its better work. But now I think I have to classify it under "fauxgressive" over this - there's just no excuse for having a public comments section on its website and then removing any and all criticism of it in any topic that's not something trivial like pop culture).
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I is learing Elgish be hard to!
One more... 
Who took my lollypop!?
