Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Josh Hawley

Josh Hawley
Voting period ends on 18 Jan 2021  at 22:58:58 (UTC)
 * Reason:High-quality, compelling portrait of US senator Josh Hawley, an important figure in American politics right now and likely to come. High EV to Hawley and related articles.
 * Articles in which this image appears:Josh Hawley, 2018 United States Senate election in Missouri, 2016 Missouri Attorney General election, List of United States senators from Missouri, United States congressional delegations from Missouri, List of new members of the 116th United States Congress, Religious affiliation in the United States Senate
 * FP category for this image:Featured pictures/People/Political
 * Creator:Rebecca Hammel, U.S. Senate Photographic Studio


 * Support as nominator – AllegedlyHuman (talk) 22:58, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose another official portrait. --Gnosis (talk) 23:48, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose. Now is a very poorly chosen moment to feature a picture of him as composed, official, and patriotic. It sends a message of non-neutrality, regardless of whether such a picture might be appropriate in other circumstances. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:52, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose Unremarkable official portrait, basically a decent yearbook photo. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 01:30, 9 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Comment Genuine Q here: how would the majority of FP political portraits not also be considered "yearbook photos?" I'm trying to understand your rationale for opposing. AllegedlyHuman (talk) 21:05, 9 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose – per all above. Bammesk (talk) 05:09, 9 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose – per all above. --Janke | Talk 11:24, 9 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Oppose – Per previous. And given the current U.S. political climate, it smacks of hype/POV. Suggest close. – Sca (talk) 16:31, 9 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Comment As the nominator, I feel obligated to say this nomination wasn't POV, and I'm not too keen on personal attacks suggesting otherwise. To be frank, I don't like Hawley myself. This merely came about when I was editing the page and remarked to myself "huh, that's a pretty good photo." Nothing more. However, given the wide backlash against this nom, I can see this clearly wasn't the time. I'd suggest potentially reviewing policy to include something about if a subject is controversial or the subject of a current political event, as I could not find anything regarding that myself, and yet the majority of votes have something to do with that. AllegedlyHuman (talk) 21:05, 9 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Not a personal attack – a comment on the import of the photo given the current climate. "Smacks of" doesn't quite mean it's intentionally POV, it means that in the current circumstances it could be interpreted as POV; a connotation rather than a denotation. (Besides, it's a boring official photo.) – Sca (talk) 14:02, 10 January 2021 (UTC)


 * If you want a policy to review, I suggest the one I alluded to in my comment above: WP:NPOV. In ordinary times, an anodyne portrait portraying a politician as a normal if boring-looking human person would be neutral enough. These are not normal times, and that portrayal is (one hopes, temporarily) not a neutral one. It is telling the world "we think that this portrayal of Hawley, and not the one of him raising his fist in support of a fascist coup attempt, is how people should be thinking of him right now, and it's so important that you forget that other image that we're going to take the step of promoting the non-fascist image to our front page". Is that really what you think we should be saying? —David Eppstein (talk) 05:28, 10 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Comment Let me make my views on the subject clear once again. I do not like Josh Hawley. In fact, I shouldn't need to tell you this, but I in fact voted against him, twice, and in a large sense, I am sympathetic to what you are saying. However, after reviewing other photos that have been passed as FP, I do not believe that this standard you are proposing here has been equally applied at all. There are, right now, profiles of Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and Andrew Jackson that have all passed FP, all of which depict their respective subjects as sage and statesmanlike. Why can't this same principle be applied to a sitting, democratically elected U.S. senator? Sure, Hawley has a now-infamous (and copyrighted and non-free) image of him raising a fist, but these figures surely have photos of mass graves and other atrocities that would reflect their tenures more accurately, and yet WP has decided to depict them this way in their infoboxes and even the Main Page. Additionally, an image on perhaps the most contentious issue in modern politics, depicting a slogan that would surely make some sensible people's blood boil, was allowed to go on the Main Page as well, because WP editors chose to ambivalently decide FP status based on the quality of an image. All I am asking is for this image to be treated the same. Some editors have done this, and I applaud them (though I would like more clarification on 's "yearbook photo" comment, out of genuine curiosity). However, what many of you have shown me is that a fair, unbiased assessment of whether or not this image is of FP quality is not possible at this time, and as such I am calling on to speedily close this nomination as well. AllegedlyHuman (talk) 21:05, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

--Armbrust The Homunculus 15:41, 19 January 2021 (UTC)