Obama & Ferguson: the split screen as DoubleQuote
[ by Charles Cameron — the favorite word used on twitter to describe tonights’s split screen show was “surreal” ]
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Those of you who read me here regularly know that I believe juxtaposition is a key tool for both thinking and understanding. The split screen reporting of Obama‘s Ferguson speech, for instance…
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I was watching the speech on the White House site, and they were giving Obama the full-screen treatment — so I was unaware that things were any different elsewhere.
I feel the single screen-shot from Fox above does justice to the power of juxtaposition, but for good measure I’ll also post a screen-shot from CNN, where the “violence” is portrayed more crisply perhaps:
although the “lower third” caption doesn’t quote Obama to such powerful effect.
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For those who would like to see how the split screen treatment fared in its quieter moments as well as its more vivid ones, here’s the Fox report in full:
I find it interesting that while splitting the screen in two halves adds to the power of the effect, the attempt at a three-way split fails miserably by comparison.
ABC‘s coverage is also dramatic:
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Finally, Tina Nguyen on Mediaite offered a smörgåsbord of split screen images, and closed with a tweet from Ta-Nehisi Coates:
Oh this image. Good God. Can the White House people see this?
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) November 25, 2014
Good question: Obama clearly wasn’t in the loop about the loop he was in…
