The White House Takes a Side

MAY 21 2014 · 12:00

President Obama drops the mic at the 2016 White House Correspondents Dinner. The Obama-era White House made the GIF an instrument of statecraft, posting reaction loops to its Tumblr from 2014. Place: whitehouse.tumblr.com Figures: Obama White House communications team · Jason Goldman, Chief Digital Officer (later) · the unnamed staffer who picked the GIF Exactly one year after Wilhite's Webby acceptance speech (see [[wilhite-jif-2013]]), the official White House Tumblr posts a reaction GIF with the caption: animated GIFs (hard g). The parenthetical is a direct rebuttal of the format's creator. The Obama administration has, in the most low-key possible way, sided with the internet majority on the pronunciation question. The post is reblogged 50,000+ times within a week. Coverage runs in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and BuzzFeed. The pronunciation question briefly becomes a head-of-state matter; the White House communications team declines to elaborate further.