By now you've probably seen the NBC News scoop—"News media paid Melania Trump thousands for use of photos in 'positive stories only'"—about the peculiar way the first lady has been profiting from the demand for images of her. As Andrew W. Lehren, Emily R. Siegel and Merritt Enright of NBC News report,
Since her husband took office Melania Trump has earned six figures from an unusual deal with a photo agency in which major media organizations have indirectly paid the Trump family despite a requirement that the photos be used only in positive coverage. President Donald Trump's most recent financial disclosure reveals that in 2017 the first lady earned at least $100,000 from Getty Images for the use of any of a series of 187 photos of the first family shot between 2010 and 2016 by Belgian photographer Regine Mahaux.
As a public service to the unwitting—and generally cash-strapped—media, Ad Age would like to take this moment to remind everyone of the existence of the official White House Flickr account, which contains public domain images (i.e., there is no cost associated with publishing them) of not only President Trump doing presidential things (kinda), but his wife doing first lady things (more or less).
Scrolling through the 1,408 (and counting) images posted since 2016 by the Trump Administration is an interesting exercise in and of itself: These are official White House photos—ergo, this is how Team Trump wants us to see it.
A search suggests that Melania Trump appears in 380 of those images—though, strangely, she's not actually seen in every one of them; for instance, a photo captioned "First Lady Melania Trump visits China | November 10, 2017" shows a panda bear, but not Melania Trump. Fake news!
Ad Age Creative Director Erik Basil Spooner did, though, find an image of Melania with the panda bear—which, again, is in the public domain, so it can be used for any sort of coverage, positive or negative.