Friday, September 05, 2008
Two Frames, and You Can See Either or Both
Annenberg's incomparable Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Bill Moyers' Journal on the Republican convention and the election. Well worth watching -- smart, insightful, thoughtful analysis. The video doesn't seem to be up yet, but I'm hoping it will be by the time you click through. [Video now posted]
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4 comments:
First of all this is surprisingly good analysis and might even make Ms. Jamieson worthy of removing the major floating quotes from her "expert" title.
Second, I want to point out what I think was one of the most interesting parts of the interview. When discussing how Mr. McCain's age is being used against him by the Democratic party, Ms. Jamison makes the following observation about an Obama ad which tried to highlight Mr. McCain as being "out of touch." Jamieson said:
"Then they move in that ad to show a section with Senator McCain talking with President Bush in the White House in which they slow the footage down to make him appear out of touch. He's blinking very slowly. He looks sleepy. What is the ad doing? It's evoking age and concerns about age. I would say age stereotypes. And I think doing that is unfair."
Is this real unfair? Is this any less fair then highlighting a candidate's voting record or experience?
I for one think that it is no different, what do you all think?
Well, it seems to me that camera manipulation in order to portray an unflattering portrait of your competition is unfair. You aren't showing the true footage - you're showing the footage altered. If Obama ran some of those photoshopped photos of Palin, you'd certainly feel they were unfair. Isn't this the same thing, only be a different degree?
But they didn't manipulate the picture itself they only slowed it down, do you really believe this is unfair or just doesn't seem to be the right thing to do? (Just because it may upset you, and it upsets me a lot, doesn't make it "unfair")
Yes. I think slowing down a video to make an opponent look older and weaker is misleading and the wrong thing to do. It may seem like a small thing (with all the lies in politics) but even a small lie is still a lie.
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