Possibly the most embarrassingly air-headed WaPo headline ever. Maybe we should just look away...

But here it is: "Frederick Douglass photos smashed stereotypes. Could Elizabeth Warren selfies do the same?"

Smashed stereotypes... God help us. This is an idea for a column that should have been considered for 5 to 10 seconds and laid to rest.

Some text, to give you the idea:

The two are separated by race, gender and more than 100 years of history that forged an America that would probably be unrecognizable to Douglass. Still, experts say, their use of photography collapses the distance: Douglass sat for scores of pictures to normalize the idea of black excellence and equality, and Warren’s thousands of selfies with supporters could do the same for a female president.

This is like some nitwit celeb saying that Hollywood is reminiscent of a slave plantation.

As Yale professor David Blight writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” Douglass used the photos — in which he appeared elegantly dressed, his hair perfectly arranged — as “a means of spreading influence.” Douglass created “for a wide audience successive images of the intelligent, dignified black man,” Blight argues, in a larger bid to convince the country that black inferiority was a racist myth....

Although in a vastly different context, Warren is today confronting another harmful myth, experts said: that a woman is not presidential and does not belong in the Oval Office. Over the course of her campaign, she’s developed a similar strategy to fight back. At the end of every rally, Warren — one of three front-runners in the Democratic race, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll — stays behind to pose for pictures with pretty much every supporter who asks....

“She’s presenting a public image of herself as somebody who is presidential,” said Alexander Alberro, a Columbia professor who studies the history of photography. “What Douglass tried to do was to create a public persona in the face of the negative type of image of African Americans at the time … so I think the comparison is really good.”...

Warren’s photos — especially those in which she poses alongside young girls — are reshaping American perceptions of who can serve as president, experts said.

Just awful. But the author (Hannah Natanson) got "experts" to buy into the comparison. They obviously weren't experts in what's abysmally embarrassing!