Black Enough? Too Black? Not Black Enough, Apparently.
| So this has been floating around for a few days now, but I finally feel like mentioning it. There has been a suggestion (a lot of suggestions actually) that the Hillary camp finally found an answer to that question of whether or not Obama is black enough: he isn’t quite black enough, so it looks like they took it upon themselves to darken him up a bit, literally. | |
| The good people at the DailyKos have meticulously analyzed the video, the footage it came from, and the changes, and I’m convinced that it was doctored by the Clinton campaign, and doctored on purpose. Not only did they darken his skin, they warped the aspect radio to make his face look wider than it really is.
Another Kos reader with knowledge of a/v editing for advertising also weighed in: “I just wanted to leave a remark about this “blacker” issue, and comments that it is somehow something that just happened in the video editing process. I work in advertising (copywriter, [Big national advertising firm]). I sit in the rooms where the post production occurs, and this includes color correction. While things look different on many TVs, they don’t look this dramatically different. Nothing that you see in a final advertisement is accidental. These things are looked at (or should be looked at if they are doing their jobs) second by second. Even more unforgiving is the stretching of the footage. It is possibly the result of laziness on the part of the editor, but it would have been easier to actually not stretch it, and just crop it. Nothing in advertising is accidental. It is over-thought and then subjected to second thoughts and second guessing then over-thought and re-looked at again. I’ve been doing this ten years. It is my professional opinion that the film was made darker, and it has obviously been stretched. I will not comment on their reasons, as I can’t offer an informed case for that.” |
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It seems what they couldn’t accomplish racializing Obama through racial innuendo and race-baiting they could accomplish through Photoshop. They lose points for not giving him red glowing eyes and horns.Hillary’s campaign responded by blatantly lying about the source of the ad in this diary. Such dishonesty makes their denial of nefarious motives that much less plausible:
Despite the strong similarities between the ad on the DailyKos site and the original ad on Clinton’s Web site, Clinton spokesman Jay Carson said he spoke with the campaign’s chief ad maker, Mandy Grunwald, who said emphatically the ad on DailyKos “was not their ad.”
“We don’t know what is up there, but it is not our ad,” Carson said.
He’s lying. The YouTube video I embedded is from the campaign’s official YouTube user hillaryclintondotcom, but if it needs to be any more clear, you can watch the ad for yourself on Hillary’s website in Hillary’s media player. The skin tone is the same.
Update: This goes without saying, but the content of the attack ad itself is also bullshit, totally distorts facts, and is, as usual, blatantly hypocritical. But it wouldn’t really be a Clinton ad unless it tried to deceive voters now would it?
