April 15, 2010 05:37 AM UTC

Photoshopstroturfing, Anyone?

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• by: Colorado Pols

THURSDAY UPDATE #2: The Hill now has a story up, titled “Bennet challenger photoshopped black woman into banner.” This does not appear to be going over very well, folks.

THURSDAY UPDATE: The Denver Post’s Susan Greene, not amused:

Andrew Romanoff’s campaign is not only doctoring pictures but also accusing “every other political campaign” of doing so too…

The most obvious manipulation is the insertion of a woman who appears prominently in the center of the picture just between the words “Andrew Romanoff United States Senate” and the image of the candidate. She is African-American. Another man whose likeness was digitally added, prominently, to the picture appears to be Latino. Several more supporters inserted in the scene are smiling admiringly toward the candidate.

The effect is to make Romanoff’s crowd of boosters look bigger, more adoring and more racially diverse than in the original snapshot taken in Denver’s Washington Park in September.

“It’s simply repositioning them,” Roy Teicher, the campaign’s latest spokesman, says of the photograph he describes as a “collage” and “montage” of supporters who attended the event.

“Those minority folks were absolutely at the rally,” he adds. “We were just simply moving around random people for aesthetic reasons. It’s absolutely an accepted technique. Every campaign does it.” [Pols emphasis]…

Romanoff has struggled more than just photographically with authenticity.

Less easy to digitally manipulate is the record of the former state House speaker, who’s portraying himself as the progressive in the Senate race. Romanoff was co-chair of the Democratic Leadership Council – a kabal of the very kind of Bill Clinton-Ken Salazar-Bill Ritter-style centrists that real progressives are sick of.

It looks like Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff is trying on Marc Holtzman’s platform shoes (and his newest spokesman isn’t winning any points with his “those minority folks” comment). We’ll let the Denver Post’s Lynn Bartels explain:

A photo montage on Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff’s website was manipulated to make it appear as though an African-American supporter was standing directly at his side in the shot…

[Andrea] Mosby said Wednesday she has no problem with what happened, and Romanoff’s campaign said it did nothing wrong in putting together a series of photos that appear to be one.

“We’re not putting in someone who wasn’t at the rally. We do nothing that suggests the rally is bigger than it was,” [Pols emphasis] said campaign spokesman Roy Teicher.

“The practice of using Photoshop is absolutely accepted under these circumstances.”

We’ll leave it to you to answer questions of impropriety about the use of Ms. Mosby’s image in particular, though if you look closely you can see the crude Photoshop cut just to her right–misrepresentation or not, that’s just bad form.

But we will take issue with the suggestion that these multiple crowd shots were not spliced together for the express purpose of suggesting “the rally is bigger than it was.” For what other purpose would you splice multiple crowd shots together? To claim otherwise is, well, silly. It wouldn’t even be worth mentioning if Sacrificial Spokeslamb #4 hadn’t denied it, everybody would have just taken the fact that it’s a giant Photoshopped crowd as a given.

Almost forgot, Holtzman:

The last time doctored photos were an issue in a campaign was in 2006 when Republican gubernatorial candidate Marc Holtzman sent out a brochure with pictures of him and presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The photos had been altered to make Holtzman appear taller.

His campaign said at the time that unaltered photos were sent to the design company, and must have been changed by the staff there.

Holtzman, reached in London, laughed when he heard the issue of a doctored campaign photo had come up again…