Discussion: Now CPAC Says 'It Does Not Appear' WaPo Reporter Photoshopped Image

[system1]

Discussion for article #233704

[mantan]

The comment was a strange response to a strange story

Fixed the start of the second sentence. God I love follow-ups, sad most media doesn’t do them anymore.

[theghostofeustacetilley]

Why this is even a story is beyond me.

[jinmichigan]

So conservatives are that concerned about a mistake? No wonder they are so weird.

[jviscont1]

don’t miss CPAC’s Friday’s workshop on ‘No, they don’t all look alike’.

[ronbyers]

This only remains a story because CPAC first claimed the reporter photoshopped the image. If they had just said sorry it was a simple screw up in creation of the page, this would not have been a story.

[callmeeric]

we entered Senator Scott’s photo

we put in Ben Carson’s photo

Easy mistake.

[ottnott]

“When we entered it in, we entered Senator Scott’s photo with Senator Scott’s bio,” he told the Washington Post. “When we put in Ben Carson, we put in Ben Carson’s photo with Ben Carson’s bio.”

But when you copied and pasted the code for Scott’s bio page to use for the Carson bio page, you forgot to change the name of the photo file.

[skippyflipjack]

Only because of their response. If they’d said “We don’t know why it appeared that way for the reporter, it looked fine to us” or “We’ve fixed our photo editor’s mistake” there would have been no story. Instead they gave people some meat to dive into.

[jrlentini]

I don’t really doubt that the cached version they provided was accurate, but it wasn’t from their app or their mobile site, and that was where the reporter’s photo came from. In other words, they provided a cache of a different page and said it was proof they didn’t make the error. It was a deft sleight of hand.

[skippyflipjack]

In CPAC’s defense: when you upload an image to Wordpress it apparently creates several different sized versions. All those versions of the photo return web headers indicating that they were last changed in December 2014. There’s no way this sat on the site incorrectly for so long without anyone noticing (and they would have, since Ben Carson is their new patron saint.) So maybe the page was pointed to the wrong image (the photo of Tim Scott is from their site; he’s a speaker too) but Google’s cache points to the Ben Carson photo. (Not sure how old that cache is.) So it’s a little unclear what happened. Could possibly be a display issue

[skippyflipjack]

I think they use responsive design and there’s not a “mobile site” for iPhones per se, but I might be wrong, I don’t have an iPhone to check.

It’s also unclear which page the reporter was on; Carson’s bio shows up in a few contexts on the site. They may have provided the cache url for a different page, as you say.

[jinnj]

Hey CPAC skip the nuanced parsing of words - say ‘OOPS, that was a glitch’ and move on … but Noooooo you had to get all snippy snarky and throw a hissy fit and make accusations … that you now have to walk back.

[elisa_d]

Double hilarity with this quote:

““It does not appear that Ben was sitting in his bed and Photoshopping this,” Walters said.”

So, first…CPAC screwed up, but they had to make it clear they think the Washington Post reporter works “sitting in his bed.” Not even on his bed.

And then…there’s this whole ambiguity about which “Ben” they mean. Not that we can’t figure out that they meant the reporter, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who did a double-take with the phrase and had to check to see if they meant the reporter (whose name wasn’t familiar to me) or that Ben Carson messed this up for CPAC.

[rick]

Yeah, the “sitting in his bed” bit sounds insulting. I guess they can’t help it.

[halfbaked]

CPAC are a bunch of vile pigs, but this is a really dumb story. Let’s pretend that they did mix up the photos. So what? Are we supposed to believe that the mixup is because the person adding the information to the website is such a racist that he/she can’t tell the difference between one black man and another?

That’s a huge stretch.

What likely happened is that someone made a mistake, or a software bug, and without any other information than a screenshot of said mistake, there is no story here and anyone who publishes shit stories like this should be ashamed of themselves. It’s pathetic. If you can’t find a real story, just go get a cup of coffee.

[halfbaked]

This might be the dumbest story of the year, but it’s only February.

[lestatdelc]

Ding ding ding.

This happens VERY often. As someone who creates website landing pages and HTML emails on a daily basis, I can easily see exactly who this slip-up occurred and not a stitch of Photoshop or ignorance or bad intent on anyone’s part.

But like braying idiots who know they have a race problem, CPAC went nutty, overreacted and made insane, faceless assertions that it was evil liberal reporters faking things to make them look bad.

[publishermike]

Here’s the thing that gets me about the knee jerk response from CPAC that it must have been the reporter who either Photoshopped this, or passed it along when he received it:

Why?

1. Why would a reporter risk his career doing something like this? What possible benefit would it have for this reporter to fabricate something so patently small-minded and insignificant? Do they really think that they are important enough, or that if the reporter was indeed out to get them, that THIS would be how he would do it?

2. If it was passed along, why, in this day and age, would this reporter attach his name to something that was forwarded to him? Everyone today knows about photoshop and what can be done. When I was a reporter, I used to get assinine shit sent to me all the time; I just threw it out. Again, why would any reporter worth his/her salt tweet this if they didn’t take the screenshot themselves.

It all boils down to a reinforcement of the paranoid mindset of the right wing; that everyone, EVERYONE is out to get them.

Best response should have been: Oops, let me go check that and fix it if it’s wrong.

[elisa_d]

And gee, what an odd coincidence that this thing that happens “all the time” just happened to confuse one (very rare!) black conservative with another one.