Warts and all

Isn’t this what’s called “work to rule” in other contexts? :-)

I think Virginia Postrel has a point, mostly regarding people with animated faces- I’ve often thought that cherrypicking a frame to make someone look weird is both constantly practiced and pretty bad. The Newsweek cover isn’t an example of that, though (it’s as posed as a photo can be.)

Calvin Trillin wrote a column once about how he first learned about journalistic objectivity when the photographer being sent out to photograph the mayor asked, “Do you want him staring of into the sunset or picking his nose?”

The MSM can’t even be consistent: here’s a magazine cover showing Obama – grey hairs, wrinkles, and all. I don’t think the Dems complained.

Not sure what the complaint here is. It’s certainly the case that there a pretty wide scope for manipulation in photography both in the shooting (lighting, angle, composition, focal length, etc) and post processing (sharpening, smoothing, contrast, color balance, etc). And such manipulations are less likely to be noticed as such (or at least that has been the case — people do seem be getting more cynical/sophisticated).

As for press bias — it does seem more noticeable in this cycle. I’m sure the press overwhelmingly favored Kerry and Gore as well, but those guys were both hard to like as candidates and hard not to find somewhat ridiculous (Gore and focus-group driven personality changes from one debate to the next and his ‘alpha male’ image consultant, Kerry and his ‘reporting for duty’ and silly hunting excursion). With Obama, though, the press as a group seem to have swooned early and remain enraptured — to the point where the public has clearly noticed.

”“The Stupidest Election Ever”. And that’s mostly only because of one side.”

The Bankers from the other thread?

Jim Johnson wrote a good post on this topic called “Their Manipulation and Ours” at his blog on 22 September, including a couple of examples of way too much photoshopping:

http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/2008/09/their-manipulation-and-ours.html#links

#9 I’m sure the press overwhelmingly favored Kerry and Gore as well

Then you weren’t paying attention in 2000.

Shouldn’t that be “scrota”?

Palin retouched.

Oh wow – photoshop the head of a female VP candidate onto the body of a woman in a bikini. No, that’s not sexist at all. Nuh huh. Nothing to see here.

Thank you so much for accusing me of shouting, Alex. Nice to know that you think a person’s opinion of sexism is tiresome.

Sorry, Governor. How dare I correct someone’s punctuation and make such a blatant spelling error a few posts on?

Joshua Herring: If, in fact, the MSM is in the habit of touching up the photos of candidates that they like and not those of candidates they don’t, then that constitutes unprofessional bias, and any intelligent person would be offended by it.

Well, exactly. In the digital age, there is no such thing as an un-manipulated photo. There are many parameters none of which have an objectively ‘correct’ setting that can affect the emotional impact of an image. And ‘sins’ of omission and commission are both possible–by omitting steps in the normal photographer’s work-flow as well as adding extra ones. One way to produce an image like the famous O.J. cover would be to pick the right image to start and then not correct it in the usual way.

Would it be possible to imagine imposing professional standards for photographers that prevent this? Some kind of ‘professionally approved’ work flow? I doubt it. How would you write rules that prevented photographers from dragging that slider a little farther to the right for people they don’t like (probably not even consciously)?

About the best we can hope for is manipulation that’s subtle rather than blatant. But I’m with those who think that in the Internet age, the idea of a ‘professional’, ‘unbiased’ press has probably outlived its usefulness. Better, probably, to let the various press outlets express their bias openly rather than covertly, manipulate images however outrageously they like, and let the public take them for what they’re worth. We seem to be heading in that direction anyway, with the readership of newspapers and viewership of nightly newscasts declining inexorably.

For God’s sake, Chris, what will it take for it to be clear that Slocum is a troll? Does he have to actually tattoo “troll” on his forehead?

I know of trolls who tattoo Slocum on their scrotum’s to match their foreheads.

As the certainty of Obama’s election seems to be growing, the press seems to be tacking back to the center (in the sense of starting to worry more about the potential loss of credibility than about the possibility of an Obama defeat). I wonder if Obama partisans in the blogosphere will start to relax and tack back toward the center (in the sense of fewer obscene knee-jerk insults and more reasonable discussion)? Probably wouldn’t be that hard to do the research — just identifying a group of political blogs and tracking the frequency of the use of ‘scrotum’ would probably work.

Slocum is probably right in his claim that the average establishment journalist was more likely to support Kerry or Gore.

But he deliberately ignores the different way in which liberal and conservative journalists behaved. The liberal journalists attempted to be impartial. The conservatives organized a campaign for W. pumping GOP talking points into their stories, coordinating with the party to promote Rove’s message of the day.

I don’t think that Alterman’s ‘working the refs’ analogy is quite right. The real refs in the game were the owners of the establishment press. Even though they might be liberal on social issues, they were all the principal targets of W’s tax cuts for the top 0.1%. Any journalist who wanted to take an unfair shot at Gore or Kerry was allowed to take it. Any journalist who suggested that Bush’s numbers didn’t add up, or that his character attacks were somewhat inconsistent with his drunk driving conviction risked being fired.

The difference in this election is that the establishment media is no longer main-stream. The blogs and John Stewart have vastly more influence than CNN or CBS or NBC in the under 40 demographic.

Further, the establishment news media in the US is losing readers and viewers at a vastly higher rate than elsewhere in the west. This time round the owners realize that wingnut journalism costs them readers. That is one reason that we have not heard from Ms Coulter in a very long while.

So the wingnuts have retreated to their Fox News bunker. Folk like Slocum are not trolls, they just sit in front of Fox News 12 hours a day, leaving the bunker only for the occasional sortie into enemy territory.

What they completely fail to understand is that they are operating with a map that is as far from that of main street America as that of the Moonies or Natural Law. McCain is spending millions of his rapidly dwindling campaign fund on robo-slime calls peddling the Ayers stuff that was completely buried in the last debate. He is doing that because watching Fox News makes him think it might work.

This is the real definition of ‘blowback’ in intelligence: consuming your own propaganda.

The USSR fell for it as well. For complicated reasons the KGB decided to destabilize their puppet ruler of Afghanistan by spreading (untrue) claims that he was a CIA plant. A year later the KGB picked up the same story and decided that they had to act to remove him. The resulting coup was the ‘invasion’ that led to the fall of the USSR.

”Well, exactly. In the digital age, there is no such thing as an un-manipulated photo.”

Of course about as close to “un-manipulated” as you can get is a polaroid, but that eliminates only a small portion of possible manipulations throughout the process. Digital adds little new to the equation other than accessibility/ease to/for the untrained masses.