By David Gewirtz
If you're an active reader of the ZATZ magazines, you'll know that we're running an ongoing special report in DominoPower and OutlookPower on what might be a whole lot of missing email messages at the White House.
While doing our detailed forensic analysis, we bumped into a very strange story that has a doctored photo at its core. I'm not going to put you through the full story of the email controversy, but I thought you'd get a kick out of the wacky photo retouching aspect of it.
"If you're not familiar with Sleestaks, perhaps you're just not geeky enough."
I've pulled that portion of the story from our special report and adjusted it to be more relevant to digital photographers and those with a twisted sense of humor. In this article, we also take a closer look at the retouching itself -- and an interesting mistake.
Coptix cops to a digital chop
As anyone with any visible presence online can attest to, the so-called "blogosphere" can be a pretty cruel place. I've certainly gotten my unfair share of digital badmouthing. While some incredible journalism can and does take place on blogs, there's also a whole lot of judgement, shoot-from-the-hip reporting, and vitriolic opinion bubbling up from the bowels of blogs.
We're not the first to look into the White House email controversy, although it seems we're doing the most comprehensive analysis and we're most definitely one of the few without a political axe to grind. Apparently, a bunch of folks with a definite political bent found out the same thing we did: that a small Chattanooga Web developer named Coptix runs a DNS server for GWB43.COM (a domain representing George W. Bush, the 43rd U.S. president).
Super-briefly, a DNS server is like a phone switch for Internet domain names. You give it a domain name and it gives back an IP address. Apparently, Coptix runs such a server and one of the domains on the server belongs to the Republican party. This is not a big thing. DNS servers just route data. There's no political element to the process at all. It's just a simple database entry and its not unusual for providers of DNS services to be unaware and unaffiliated with the domains they route.
However, some bloggers went wild about this "discovery". These bloggers made the unsupported assumption that just because GWB43.COM exists, its mere existence implies that "all" White House email was routed through it. They then took the next unsupported leap, claiming that those operating the servers were obviously hiding the emails.
Apparently, this did not sit well with the techies at Coptix. They got their hands on an image of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove in Porker's Bar-B-Que in Chattanooga, as shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
Karl's porking up at Porker's. (click for larger image)
Then, the boys at Coptix fired up Photoshop, updating the image to show Mr. Rove holding a report with Coptix' name on the front, as shown in Figure B.
FIGURE B
Mr. Rove is apparently holding a Coptix report. (click for larger image)
And then, Mr. Cross and the Coptix team sat back and waited for the blogosphere to blow a gasket. Which, in short order, it did.
Traffic all across the Internet jumped to judgement, claiming that because Mr. Rove had a document in his hands from an Internet company, he was "privatizing" his White House email in an effort to hide it from public view.
Shortly after this story exploded, Josiah Roe, Executive Vice President of Coptix Inc. published an explanation in the Chattanooga Times Free Press:
Our experiment demonstrated that, as with all great marketing, Web marketing can be used by a few people to shape the way that millions think. Of course, we ran our test on April Fool's weekend, when bloggers, like all journalists, should have their skepticism synapses at their sharpest. Today, two very busy days later, we are reminded that the Internet is a tool to be mastered rather than feared, and that the right word whispered in the right ear can still carry around the world.
Examining the hacked images
You can see the changes between the two images more clearly in Figure C.
FIGURE C
There be Sleestaks here. (click for larger image)
Not only was the Coptix report placed under Mr. Rove's arm, but the television image was changed as well. Instead of the woman in the original picture, our intrepid team of photo retouchers inserted a picture of Sleestaks.
If you're not familiar with Sleestaks, perhaps you're just not geeky enough. For those of you who aren't intimately familiar with 1970's cult scifi, the Sleestaks are large, green reptilian/insectoid hybrid creatures that were featured in the 1974 series Land of the Lost. Apparently, the Coptix kids had a lot of time on their hands.
While the Sleestak image clearly was a gag, the report under Mr. Rove's arm was obviously meant to send a message. Although placement of the report in the image is pretty well done (thanks to Photoshop), there's one "gotcha" visible from the enlarged image shown in Figure D.
FIGURE D
There's no shadow on the report. (click for larger image)
As you can see, on the left side, under Mr. Rove's sleeve, there's a shadow. On the retouched side, where the report was placed, even though there's a gap between the sleeve and the report, there's no shadow.
It was a nice job, nonetheless.
I'd ordinarily like to end an article like this with a deep, insightful conclusion, and, in fact, I do go into the dangers of mob journalism over in our special report in DominoPower and OutlookPower.
Here, though, rather than looking deeply into issues of journalistic integrity, I'm simply going to recommend that if you retouch images, you keep track of your shadows.