PBS: For this inauguration, the pictures win

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On PBS, Jim Lehrer asked whether the day’s pictures might speak louder than the new president’s inaugural address.

David Brooks, the ‘NewsHour’ guy on the right, believed they would: ‘I think when people talk historically about today it will not be over one word, it will not be, ‘Well, here’s another white Anglo-Saxon guy and here’s what he said.’ It’ll just be the fact that a guy named Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated and the visual will be more powerful, for today — and I mean that visual in two senses: One, himself, but two, the crowd. And in some ways the crowd is to me the most memorable thing about the day, and that is what he has built up, and the emotion that surrounds his movement is in some way more memorable and bigger and more impressive than any sentence in the speech.’

Mark Shields, the guy on the left, agreed that ‘the picture will be dominant,’ especially ‘the picture of that humanity stretched in arctic weather from the Capitol of the United States to the Washington Monument and beyond, and peaceably assembled and joyfully commingling — that’s what will be remembered, and him taking the oath of office, and probably a picture of him embracing his child, or something of the sort. I think that’s how we’ll remember this day, rather than a single ringing phrase, a clarion call.’

— Robert Lloyd