The Web Police
One of the real things the Internet has achieved is in politics is forcing more honesty from political campaigns and the media. In the last election the whole Rathergate scandal made big news because of the Internet and bloggers. Though it made a smaller splash, bloggers also caught the Bush campaign altering a picture of Bush and some troops. Now Bret Schundler, a candidate for Governor in New Jersey, had his campaign caught using altered photos on his website yesterday at http://www.politicsnj.com/schundlergear2005.htm. Ironically he was caught using an altered photo of Howard Dean and his supporters, which probably won't play well in a Republican primary. The larger point is that with the new means of rapid communication over the Internet, some one is watching, actually a lot of people are watching and very closely. It should serve as a lesson to all campaigns that cheap tricks that they have gotten away with in the past are going to be scrutinized now. Ultimately, I think this will help lead to cleaner campaigns.
3 Comments:
I agree with your assessment. As a form of media, the internet can perform as the media is intended - as a force for accountability. Since the internet cannot be controlled by one force, that just adds to its ability to be a non-biased force for accountability.
Fascinating. I had not seen that. The rule of thumb is that a digital photo editor can alter a news photo only in ways analogous to what a photographer can do when shooting the picture: change the focal depth, blur or sharpen the background, add color filters, increase or decrease light, etc.
This obviously violates that rule.
The staffer that made the decision to alter that photo and post it deserves to be fired.
But I wonder, for every deception that is caught, how many others go unnoticed? While bloggers are great at catching dirty players, there is no way they can catch everyone. Maybe at least the fear of negative exposure will serve as a deterrent.
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