Journalism could be an extremely enticing field for people with a knack for writing and with a touch of wanderlust, but if you have the vocation, the fortitude, and the financial capacity to become a doctor of medicine, I don’t think you should allow your fascination for journalism to distract you from getting a medical degree. After all, once you have become a full-fledged and eminently successful doctor, the option will always be open for you to do medical journalism on the side like, say, Dr. Sanjay Gupta who’s now chief medical correspondent for CNN’s Health, Medical & Wellness unit—and an Emmy Award-winning one at that! (I presume you know that the well-qualified Dr. Gupta had even turned down U.S. President Barack Obama’s nomination of him to become U.S. health secretary.) And as CNN chief medical correspondent, of course, Dr. Gupta is able to satisfy what I presume to be his own kind of wanderlust by going on medical fact-finding and reporting assignments to various parts of the world. That, in my book, is having the best of both worlds in your chosen field!
But back to your question about the use of the present tense by the Internet editions of Senegal newspapers in this photo caption about President Obama’s visit to Senegal: “U.S. President, along with his wife and daughters, gets off his plane at Dakar international airport on Wednesday.” Such use of the present tense for what really are past actions or consummated activities is conventional in English-language print journalism and, even more aptly, also in TV news reporting and in web news journalism because they are capable of showing live images of events in real time. I have not read any textbook explanation for this “abnormal” tense usage as you call it, but I have always thought that using the present tense of verbs in photo captions is perfectly proper considering that the caption statement accompanies a photograph that has figuratively frozen the action in time. By looking at the photograph, therefore, the reader (with the use of some imagination) gets the sense of the instant action taking place before his very eyes, which of course is the sense that the present tense is supposed to evoke. Indeed, how incongruous and logically dissonant it would be if that photo of President Obama and his family were captioned in the past tense this way: “U.S. President, along with his wife and daughters, got off his plane at Dakar international airport on Wednesday”! Admittedly, my mind is strongly influenced by journalistic convention, but that past-tense statement sounds to me not a description of the instant action I’m looking at but the usual news reportage of a past event that more properly belongs to the newsstory proper.
Purely from a semantics standpoint, of course, the present-tense photo caption “U.S. President, along with his wife and daughters, gets off his plane at Dakar international airport on Wednesday” creates what I’d call a logical wrinkle by mismatching the present-tense verb “gets off” with the past-tense “Wednesday” as a time marker. For the sake of brevity and spontaneity of expression, this logical wrinkle is often overlooked or outrightly glossed over by many editors and caption writers—as in the case of the photo caption you presented—with them not feeling guilty about it. However, the more grammatically exacting and scrupulous editors would routinely avoid this logical wrinkle by the simple expedient of banishing the past-tense time marker to a spinned-off sentence, like this: “U.S. President Barack Obama, along with his wife and daughters, gets off Air Force One at Dakar international airport. They arrived Wednesday to begin their first major tour of Africa…” The first sentence of the caption thus becomes a purely present-tense affair, with the second sentence and all other sentences thereafter taking the past tense to establish the correct timeframe. This, to my mind, is a harmless sop to their own grammatical conscience and a halfway concession to the hidebound English grammarians in their midst.
