About

The Obama Skeet Shooting Photograph is an official photograph released in by the White House to corroborate President Obama’s claims that he enjoys skeet shooting. Despite the advisory message urging viewers not to alter the image, Internet users on various message boards and social networking sites quickly turned to Photoshop for parodies.

Origin

During an interview with New Republic^[2] on January 27th, 2013, President Obama was asked if he had ever fired a gun, to which he answered that he goes skeet shooting at Camp David frequently. Four days later, the Washington Post's Fact Checker^[13] began investigating these claims and noted that it could not find any proof of Obama having participated in skeet shooting. In response to this criticism, the White House released an official photograph of the President skeet shooting at Camp David via their official Flickr^[1] account on February 2nd, 2013, along with a caption^[4] requesting that the photograph not be manipulated in any way.

Spread

The same day, Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer tweeted^[3] the photo to more than 40,000 followers. The Flickr photograph was also shared via conservative blog Breitbart,^[4] which pointed out that photoshopped parodies were already circulating in the conservative blogosphere^[14] despite the White House's advisory message, while Twitchy^[15] posted a compilation of tweets featuring humorous altered versions of Obama's photograph. Meanwhile on 4chan, at least two separate threads dedicated to photoshopping the skeet shooting photo appeared on /b/^[10](Random) and /k/^[11] (Weapons) boards. On Reddit, the image was submitted to /r/PhotoshopBattles^[7], yielding 1494 upvotes, 1116 points overall and 313 comments within 48 hours. Select images from this thread were also shared on /r/ProGun^[8] and /r/Libertarian^[9] subreddits, as well as on several Facebook fan pages including We Will Not Be Disarmed^[6] and the Obaminator,^[7] followed by the launch of two new Facebook fan pages Obama Skeet Shooting Oh So Funny Pics^[17] and Obama The Skeet Shooter,^[16] which had gained more than 2,000 likes between them by February 4th. Throughout the first weekend of February, similar compilations of photoshopped parodies were featured on several political blogs and news sites, including The Blaze^[18], Moonbattery^[19], The New York Post^[20] and The Daily Mail.^[21]

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References