Newsmax: 'Heartland' conservatism

It’s not yet clear whether Donald Trump’s moment as a Republican presidential candidate has come and gone, but it is clear which media outlet had the most to do with Trump’s sudden rise — and thereby solidified its role as a major conservative voice. It was Newsmax, the website that Media Matters dubbed the “No. 1 Promoter of Trump 2012,” but which founder Christopher Ruddy describes as a voice of a Heartland populism that more established conservative publications do not understand. Ruddy, who is best known for the conspiracy theories about the Clinton administration he pushed in the 1990’s, has imbued Newsmax with a distinctive and sometimes contradictory voice — “a little less aggressive” than Fox, as he describes it — that seems to channel the concerns of the talk radio listeners he considers his core audience. “The Beltway has thought of conservative media as the National Review,” Ruddy said. “But when someone in Tucson or San Francisco thinks of conservative media — someone that follows Fox or Rush — they think of Newsmax.” Although Newsmax had a major role in legitimizing Trump’s candidacy among conservatives, Ruddy said he has no plans to endorse a GOP candidate. In fact, every Republican who has even been whispered about as running in 2012 has made the pilgrimage to the Newsmax headquarters in West Palm Beach for an interview. (Mike Huckabee, the sole exception, did his interview by phone.) But besides demonstrating its influence on the right, Newsmax has pulled off something even more impressive under Ruddy: It has managed to make money and grow as the rest of print media was laying off staff and scaling back. Newsmax magazine’s paid circulation was 228,337 by the end of last year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, nearly double what it was the year earlier. (By comparison, National Review’s paid circulation is 188,856, as of December.) Its website had 3.9 million unique visitors in March, according to Nielsen Online, nearly one million more unique visitors than reported for the Drudge Report. It’s done that by targeting a specific and hardly popular demographic — people older than 50, for whom politics is important but not everything. “We do offer that. But that’s really one component in the growth of Newsmax. We are really focused, as a business model, on the demographic. I can tell you that there’s not a lot of money in conservative politics.” In March, 42.5 percent of the Newsmax.com web traffic, by far the largest chunk, came from readers who were 65 or older, according to Nielsen. The magazine itself is a mix of news reporting, columns and lifestyle featuresinterspersed with many ads for gold, silver and pills that claim to reverse aging. Its corresponding website is free, but an array of subscription newsletters and websites, such as Moneynews.com, Newsmaxhealth.com and The Blaylock Wellness Report. Today, subscriptions make up the lion’s share of Newsmax’s revenue — more than $30 million of the $52 million in revenue the company reportedlast year. In a sense, what Ruddy has been able to do is attract the same audience for talk radio to print, and it’s no surprise that talkers like Rush Limbaugh have been important amplifiers of the company’s brand of journalism. “Newsmax talks to the same core that conservative talk radio does, and they are very good at talking the language,” said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, adding that Newsmax was “a little bit more populist than some of the more politically oriented media out there.” The magazine devoted its December issue to the tea party, declaring on the cover, “The Revolution Begins” and featuring more than a dozen photos from Sarah Palin’s visit to the company’s offices. “In an exciting afternoon at Newsmax, the electrifying former governor meets our staff,” begins the subhead on the article. But Ruddy, who doesn’t personally support the kind of large-scale spending cuts that many tea party members favor, says Newsmax is too independent to be a tea party vehicle. “I think we have a huge following of tea party people, but we don’t allow the tea party to drive Newsmax,” he said. Rather, the magazine is filled with a sense of speaking for “flyover country,” as one writer put it. “I think publications like Newsmax reach out to the Heartland,” Ruddy said. Ruddy’s background makes him an unlikely spokesman for the Heartland. The son of a cop, Ruddy grew up in Long Island and gravitated to journalism after college and the London School of Economics. He first got the attention of the broader journalism world in 1993, when, as editor-in-chief of the New York Guardian, an conservative publication that would be bought the next year by Human Events, he debunked parts of a PBS documentary about an all-black Army battalion liberating German concentration camps in World War II. “People at News Corp. and Murdoch’s empire heard about it, and I was hired at the New York Post,” he said. At the Post, he began focusing on the death of Vincent Foster, a lawyer in the Clinton White House, continuing to report on Foster when he moved to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the conservative daily owned by Richard Mellon Scaife, the wealthy funder of right-wing causes. Ruddy became perhaps the best-known purveyor of the theory that Foster had not committed suicide, but had been murdered, making the case in his book, “The Strange Death of Vincent Foster.” Joe Conason, co-author of “The Hunting of the President: The 10 Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton,” has characterized Ruddy and Scaife as the starring members in the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that sought to bring down the Clinton presidency. These days, Ruddy and Scaife are business partners (60%/40%) in Newsmax, and Ruddy no longer sees himself as a bomb thrower. In fact, he and Bill Clinton have formed one of the more unlikely political friendships, with Clinton joining the ranks of those stopping by Ruddy’s offices in Florida. “We don’t agree on everything, but I had a reevaluation of him,” Ruddy said. “I think Bush was not a great president, and was not true to what I would see as Reagan conservative principles on how to govern and foreign policy. So many Republicans drank the Kool-Aid with him, but when I look back at Clinton, Clinton followed in Reagan’s footsteps in so many ways. I had differences with him in the ’90s, but his foundation does incredible work.” That more conciliatory tone extends somewhat to President Barack Obama as well, though Ruddy is critical of many of his policies. “I think some of the Fox hosts have been very aggressive with Obama, calling him socialist and the like,” Ruddy said. “We would never go that far at Newsmax.” Of course, Newsmax’s critics at ConWebWatch highlight some very tough talk on Obama that has appeared in the magazine, with Morris saying in a 2009 Newsmax promotion that “I think that Obama definitely is leading America into socialism.” But Newsmax has not traditionally been seen as a platform for birtherism, with Ruddy telling interviewers — and recently even his friend Trump, to whose Mar-A-Lago club in Palm Beach he belongs — that he believes the president was born in Hawaii. But that disagreement did not stop Newsmax’s enthusiastic coverage of the New York billionaire, nor did Obama’s pointed criticism of “carnival barkers” at a press conference last week announcing he was releasing his long-form birth certificate. Newsmax had actually floated the idea of a Trump presidential candidacy as early as 2006, in a column by Ron Kessler, its chief Washington correspondent, claiming that Trump “has plenty of thoughts about what he would do if he were president.”And it was Kessler who got the scoop that Trump planned to make an announcement about his candidacy following the finale of “The Celebrity Apprentice” later this month and wrote a column, entitled “Don’t Underestimate Donald Trump for President.” Newsmax’s first journalistic coup with the current batch of Republican possible presidential hopefuls was its decision to put a photo of Palin on the cover of the issue that was on newsstands the day John McCain picked her as his running mate in 2008. When other interviewers followed Katie Couric’s infamous interview with questions for Palin about what she is reading, she usually started off by mentioning Newsmax. “I spoke to her, and she said, ‘Oh, I’ve been getting your emails forever,’ ” said Ruddy. “She’s an email subscriber. That’s why she resonates. She speaks the language of conservatives out in the Heartland,” Ruddy said. Some Newsmax stories have made it to the mainstream news cycle. Last year, Kessler broke the news that a third person had crashed the Obama’s first state dinner at the White House. And in January, Newsmax won a Gold “Eddie” from Folio magazine for its story about Obama’s war with Fox News. But not all conservatives see Newsmax as a major national voice. “I feel that it’s sort of like the Washington Times paper, where it will always exist, and it has its credibility and it serves certain Republicans, and it had probably grown a little bit as the tea party has grown, but after that, there is a certain cap on that,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist. But Kessler said the magazine’s profile is improving in the capital, and not just among conservatives.“The rest of Washington is also more aware of Newsmax and the clout that it has,” he said. Meanwhile, Newsmax has had some hire profile hires. Its editor, Ken Chandler, held the same job at the New York Post, and it recently signed on two more big mainstream media names: Judith Miller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter, and Steve Coz, former editorial director of American Media, the supermarket tabloid group that owns the National Enquirer and Star. Miller said Ruddy made her “a very good offer,” but she said she decided to sign on because of Ruddy’s vision of what he wanted the magazine to become. “The emphasis right now,” she said, “more than on ideology, is on quality — improving the quality and improving the strength of the stories.”

© 2011 Capitol News POLITICO

TODAY ON THE SUNDAY TALK SHOWS

CNN – Donilon: Bin Laden intelligence haul is size of“a small college library”
FOX – Cheney: Enhanced interrogation “was not torture”
NBC – Hayden: "Let’s see what happens to this network now"
CBS – Rumsfeld: Obama made “the right decision”
ABC – Pakistani ambassador to the U.S.: “Heads will roll”
CSPAN – American Petroleum Institute chief: Stop “penalizing” us

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CNN: STATE OF THE UNION

Donilon: Bin Laden intelligence haul is size of “a small college library”

National Security Adviser Tom Donilon discussed the raid that resulted in the death of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. “It turns out that this is the largest cache of information gotten from a senior terrorist – gotten from any terrorist in one operation,”Donilon said of the information Navy SEALS were able to gather. “It’s about the size of a small college library, and we'll – we have put together a multi agency task force to go through it.” Asked about the change in the government’s message regarding the role bin Laden played in al Qaeda Donilon said, “What we now know, again taking a look initially here, is that he had obviously a operational and strategic role, and a propaganda role for al Qaeda. Which again makes the operation last Sunday I think more significant in terms of its affect on – affect on al Qaeda.”

Asked to describe the terrorist leader’s final moments, Donilon said, “At no point in the course of this operation did Osama bin Laden indicate that he was prepared to surrender. This is an organization known obviously for suicide bombing, IEDs, booby trapping buildings. And I think our forces, with no signal from him that he was prepared to surrender, acted completely appropriately. And I don't think anybody is going to second guess their judgment.” Asked if he worried if the initial reporting undercut the moment, Donilon said he did not. “The messages that have come back to us from around the world – and I study this very closely-- is that this was a just action.”

Donilon said he had not seen any evidence to suggest that political, military or intelligence agencies in Pakistan were complicit in sheltering bin Laden.

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked if he thought the United States would withhold aid to Pakistan. “I don’t see that at all. ... As a matter of fact Pakistan is a critical factor in the war against terror,” Lugar said.

The conversation turned to the status of the U.S. troop draw-down in the overall war on terror. Asked what size of a draw-down he would find acceptable, Lugar said, “Perhaps 10,000-to-25,0000 troops would satisfy our ability to fight terror — that is, with intelligence backing.”

“In the front room, we discuss money every day,” Lugar said in defense of his call for such a significant troop draw-down, “But in the back room we talk about foreign policy” as if the two are not related. “So we’re going to have to think very carefully about our objectives.”

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen discussed the ongoing fight between Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi and rebel forces. “The game is up for Gaddafi,” Rasmussen said. Asked if NATO member nations were supplying arms to the Libyan rebels, Rasmussen would not deny it outright saying, “It’s not part of the NATO mandate.”

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FOX NEWS SUNDAY

Cheney: Enhanced interrogation “was not torture”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney (R) gave tepid praise to President Obama for his decision to send in a Navy Seal team to kill Osama bin Laden, saying Obama deserves "a lot of credit." Cheney used Bin Laden's killing to defend the use of water boarding and other methods that the former administration called “enhanced interrogation,” and pilloried Obama for banning their use. "It’s not clear to me today that we have an interrogation program that we could put somebody through should we capture a high-value detainee that had crucial information," Cheney said. "It was a good program. It was a legal program. It was not torture."

Cheney said that his administration's interrogation methods played a role in the intelligence that led to locating Bin Laden, citing conversations he's had with the former top human intelligence officer at the CIA, Jose Rodriguez, and former attorney general Michael Mukasey, as well as remarks by current CIA director Leon Panetta. "All have said one way or the other that the enhanced integration program played a role," Cheney said.

Cheney also attacked Obama’s policy in Libya and smirked when host Chris Wallace described Obama's philosophy as "lead from behind." "I’ve been confused by it," Cheney said, adding that the mission was too important to turn over to NATO. "Frankly, NATO only functions effectively when the United States is involved to lead NATO."

Cheney said he gives Obama "high marks" for his use of drones to kill terrorists in Pakistan, but that he worries the raid on bin Laden’s compound could be used as a reason to leave Afghanistan before the country is stable enough to keep terrorist cells from operating there. Asked about his recent health problems, Cheney said his condition has greatly improved this year from the point when he entered the hospital with "end-stage heart failure." He plans to go fishing later this month, but added that he's "not supposed to fall in."

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NBC: MEET THE PRESS

Hayden: "Let’s see what happens to this network now"

Tom Donilon said that President Obama's briefing by Navy Seals on Friday was "a very moving moment."

"He was not briefed by the leaders but by the operators," Donilon said.

Michael Chertoff, former director of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush, said that the killing of bin Laden could open the door to different types of attacks from al-Qaeda. Bin Laden preferred larger, more intricately planned attacks and his death could cause the group to adopt tactics similar to those used in Mumbai, where small bands of armed fighters took over buildings in the city. "We have to be more careful than ever to look at what tactical changes they may make moving forward," he said.

Those comments were echoed by former CIA director Michael Hayden. "Let’s see what happens to this network now," Hayden said. "If bin Laden did have such a controlling hand, you’re going to have a lot more independent actors.”
Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani praised the raid as a major turning point, saying "this is like removing a Hitler or a Stalin in the middle of those conflicts." He said his lunch with Obama and New York City firefighters last week was "a very emotional and satisfying experience."


"There’s no mistaking the fact that there’s a burden that’s been lifted from" the firefighters, Giuliani said.

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CBS: FACE THE NATION

Rumsfeld: Obama made “the right decision”

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). described the divergent goals of the United States and Pakistan, among them Pakistan’s focus primarily on India as a potential terrorist threat, “The Pakistanis have had a different set of interests about India, a different set of interests about what kind of Afghanistan they want to see.

“Everybody has to understand that even in the getting of Osama bin Laden, the Pakistanis were helpful,” Kerry said. “We have people on the ground in Pakistan, because they allow us to have them.”

“If out of this Osama bin Laden event, Pakistan now decides to really engage in a very different strategic relationship,”Kerry said, “that could significantly -- and I do mean significantly-- change the dynamic with the Taliban, the possibilities of reconciliation, the possibilities of negotiation, and ultimately the numbers of troops that are in Afghanistan.”

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also gave his reaction to the killing of bin Laden, offering some praise for the president. “The decision by the president was, in my view, the right decision,” he said.

But the compliment was quickly followed by criticism of the administration’s handling of the details about the raid. “I would have preferred a lot less discussion out of the White House about intelligence personally,” said Rumsfeld. “My guess is that people in the Pentagon feel that way.”

Asked about the Pakistani government’s claim that it did not known bin Laden was so close to Islamabad, compared the bin Laden compound to the gated, luxury homes along the Potomac river, “We don't know what's going on there. And it is possible that someone like that with a support system like al Qaeda, in my view very likely could hide in plain sight.”

Rumsfeld, like Cheney, also defended the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. “I think it’s clear that those techniques used by the CIA worked,” Rumsfeld said.

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ABC: THIS WEEK

Pakistani ambassador to the U.S.: “Heads will roll”

National Security Adviser Tom Donilon trumpeted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden as a major victory for the United States. "He was engaged not just in being a symbolic leader of al Qaeda, but he was involved in the strategic and operational leadership," Donilon said. "This is a really serious blow to them. It's a milestone on our way to strategic defeat.”

Donilon said the CIA has characterized the trove of intelligence collected in the raid "as the size of a small college library." Donilon demanded answers from Pakistan on how bin Laden could have lived for so long in a safe house less than a mile from an army training academy. “We need to know how this happened and they need to know how this happened"

Pakistani Ambassador Husain Haqqani said that the head of the country's army is conducting an investigation into how the terrorist leader could have gone undetected. "Heads will roll, once the investigation has been completed," Haqqani said. "Pakistan wants to put to rest any misgivings the world has about our role.?.?.We have been victims of terrorism."

Pakistan is interrogating bin Laden's wives and children, Haqqani said, declining to share specific information they have given authorities. He also said that the country's leaders were rightly concerned about the raid. "What we are offended by is the violation of our sovereignty," Haqqani said. "America has a selling job to do in Pakistan too. Convince more Pakistanis that you are more of our ally."

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CSPAN: NEWSMAKERS

American Petroleum Institute chief: Stop “penalizing” us

Jack Gerard, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute was asked about the rising — and now falling — price of gasoline. “As the price of crude comes down, you will see the price of gasoline fall,” Gerard said. He outlined a number of factors as contributing the price of oil and gasoline, including supply and demand, unrest in the Middle East and unemployment among other things.

Gerard went on to describe calls for the elimination of oil and gas industry subsidies as “penalizing” one of American business’s most successful sectors. “We are clearly not only paying our fair share, we’re paying more than our share.”

“It really comes down to the question of how big does the government need to be,” Gerard said.
By T.W. Farnam and Emi Kolawole

Who had the worst week in Washington? Donald Trump.

JONATHAN ERNST/ REUTERS - Donald Trump and his wife Melania (R) arrive at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington on April 30.

Ten days ago, Donald Trump was on top of the world.

President Obama had released his long-form birth certificate. Trump, touting the “birther” controversy as he sought momentum for a possible run at the GOP presidential nomination, was in New Hampshire crowing about it. Cable television showed the two men in a split screen! Everything was coming together.

Until it wasn’t. Last Saturday, Trump — or, more accurately, Trump’s hair — was the primary punching bag (can you punch hair?) in speeches by Obama and comedian Seth Meyers at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. (Trump, in keeping with his reputation, greeted the good-natured ribbing with a stone-faced stare.)
Then on Sunday night, his “Celebrity Apprentice” show on NBC was preempted by coverage of Obama at his most presidential — delivering a speech announcing that Osama bin Laden had been killed.
There was other evidence that the air had begun to go out of the Trump balloon. A new Washington Post-Pew poll showed that just one in 10 people think Obama wasn’t born in the United States, half the proportion who said the same just a month ago. And, in a new Quinnipiac University poll, 58 percent of people said they would “never” vote for Trump. (An equal number in the survey said they would never vote for former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.)
Trump, because of his outsize personality, will remain in the news as long as he continues to talk about running for president. Of late, he has sounded even more serious about a bid, telling Bloomberg News that “in my mind, I have already decided. . . . I am going to announce.”
But the events of the past week undercut the notion that Trump is a serious — or even a semi-serious — contender.
Donald Trump, for politically peaking before you ever got into the race, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something.

A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies...looks at the tea partier and says, "Watch out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie”

At one point, 83 percent of Detroit’s population was black.

Nearly Half Of Detroiters Can't Read

Detroit was once the symbol of American wealth and industrial capacity. It is now everybody's emblem of decline. 

The data about Detroit grow more depressing by the month.  This report may be the most depressing thing you'll read all year. 

In a nutshell, it says that roughly half of all the people who live in Detroit are illiterate. They can't read the back of a cereal box.  They can't read a weather report.  They can't read at all. 

As Andrew Coulson notes in his blog at Cato: "Virtually the entire illiterate  population has completed elementary school, the level at which reading is theoretically taught. That’s seven years of schooling (k-6), at a cost of roughly $100,000, for… nothing."

By way of epitaph, last month every teacher in the Detroit public school system was laid off. 

THE REAL REASON FOR GWB LOW PRPFILE? Next election! Watch after November 2012 GWB will be all over the place!

Bush Wanted to Keep Low Profile

 

Former first lady Laura Bush said George W. Bush decided not to go to ground zero with President Obama Thursday because he believes only acting presidents should participate in such official ceremonies.

 

 “That’s for President Obama to do at this point,” she told the Associated Press.

 Laura Bush also said that she and her husband were at out at dinner Sunday night when they heard Obama was trying to reach him.

 The former president returned home to take the call informing him that Osama bin Laden had been killed.

Read it at Associated Press

Bin Laden Wife Didn’t Leave Compound

 Getty Images

 

Amal Ahmed Abdul-Fattah, the wife of Osama bin Laden who was injured in the raid that killed him, reportedly told Pakistani interrogators that she hadn’t left the compound where he was shot for five years.

She and eight of bin Laden’s children lived in the Abbottabad compound, she said.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials said they hadn’t done an autopsy on bin Laden’s body before burying him at sea. Although the chief of al Qaeda was said to require dialysis for kidney disorders, no dialysis machines were found at the house.

Read it at CNN

SARAH PALIN: "Isn't She Pretty, Isn't She Nice?"

Image: Roger H. Goun v. Flickr Joe McGinniss Joe McGinniss is an American author who has published 11 books over the course of 40 years, including The Selling of the President, Going to Extremes, and Fatal Vision. His next book, The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, comes out this September.

There's really nothing to say about this Washington Post story about Sarah Palin attending parties last Saturday in DC, except:

a) it makes me want to throw up
and

b) Sarah’s comeback from Tucson is on track, exactly as she wants it to be, with mainstream media rolling over and begging her to scratch their jelly bellies once again.

Visitors to this blog, and even people who will buy The Rogue in September, constitute only a tiny minority of the American voting public. A much larger minority–encouraged by mainstream media such as Vanity Fair and the Washington Post–still find Sarah fascinating, even dazzling.

We might wish she was yesterday’s breakfast, but as long as mainstream editors, publishers and reporters beg for the chance to pose for a photo with her, she remains likely to be a main course at the 2012 election banquet. She might even wind up looking for a White House chef.

There is no morality in mainstream media. There is only venal self-interest. There are (with a certain few exceptions) only weary whores who would trade what’s left of their souls for the chance to pose for a snapshot with a celebrity.

This is your Washington “press corps,” ladies and gentlemen. Better described as the Washington “press corpse.”

Its theme song is “Celebrity Über Alles.”

This post originally appeared at The Rogue Blog.

The Trig Palin Hoax Theory All Hinges On One Telling Photo

See Also:

Sarah Palin Still Can't Name An Influential Journalist

Trump and Palin Continue To Implode

Trump and Palin Continue Their Grim Slide

At the outset of writing about the controversy surrounding Trig Palin’s birth, I said clearly that I could go either way on what to believe about this story.

On the one hand, I do see why some consider this to be possibly the greatest and most malevolent hoax in the history of American politics.

Yet, I remain intrigued by the odd, conflicting, indeed seemingly contrived anecdotes about what is now widely called The Wild Ride, Mrs. Palin’s allegedly reckless and lengthy return to Alaska while leaking amniotic fluid and suffering contractions unbeknownst to anyone around her in order to avoid delivering in Texas someone who might one day pick fish. 

Those who believe in the hoax theory argue that pictures tell nearly the entire story. That all one has to do is look at a few photos to determine that Mrs. Palin was not pregnant.

Me? I’m a skeptic. Or maybe I’m just stupid. Although with two degrees from Columbia University, for both of which I had to write a thesis (neither of which informs my thoughts or opinions today, even though I received A’s on them, Mrs. Palin), some might call me a notch above stupid.

Things need to be spelled out for me. I know there is someone out there who can explain away every single, niggling detail about this very strange birth story. But she doesn’t appear to want to do that.

So, I thought I’d start with the photos. And little did I know that Professor Brad Scharlott, whose paper on the Spiral Of Silence has got more people talking about this birth story than ever before, is actually a Photoshop expert.

Prof. Scharlott teaches both digital publishing and photojournalism at Northern Kentucky University.  And he said he’d be glad to talk me through a few of the more famous pictures.

BS: Thank you for that introduction, Laura, but let me qualify what you said. I have been teaching digital publishing since the late 1980s, and I’ve taught photojournalism for nearly a decade. So I’ve had to learn a lot about Photoshop and related programs in order to teach them to my students. I’m pretty good at “photoshopping” pictures, as that word is generally used – for example, I can put people’s heads on animals’ bodies, for laughs – but calling me an expert might be an overstatement. Still, I know enough to effectively teach digital photography and photo editing to college students.

Today I’d like to focus on a picture of Palin that appeared in the Anchorage Daily News on March 14, 2008. That was nine days after Palin announced that she was seven month pregnant, and four and half weeks before she allegedly gave birth to Trig on April 18. Here it is, as it appeared in the newspaper:

While Palin looks fairly trim in this photo, it’s hard to tell just how flat her stomach is, because the darkness of her outfit obscures details.

Here’s where an experienced digital photographer can help. It’s well-known among the pros that dark areas in a photograph can be lightened to show details that otherwise will not be apparent. Any photo-editing program can be used to adjust the brightness level of a photo like this; that includes the photo-editing programs that are bundled for free with most new computers. People reading this who want to experiment can copy the above picture to their own computer, open the picture in iPhoto (if you are using a Mac, as I am), then click on the “Edit” icon, bring up the “Adjust” panel, and finally pull the “Shadows” slider to the right. (If you don’t see the “Adjust” panel, drag a corner of the photo to make it bigger.) And while you are at it, you might also bump up the brightness and contrast sliders a bit, also.

What will your adjusted photo look like? Probably like this: 

Sarah’s flat stomach is now quite apparent. Notice that neither I, nor you, dear reader (if you followed along) moved a single pixel (a “pixel” is a dot in a digital picture). And I did not use Photoshop, so no one can accuse me, in any sense, of “photoshopping” the picture.

Let me address that term, by the way. When “photoshop” is used as a verb, generally it means to deceive by adding or subtracting or altering certain elements in a picture. But using Photoshop (or any other photo editing program) to simply lighten a photo is not deceptive. So be wary of what people really mean why they use the word “photoshopped.” 

LN: Okay, Brad, I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a moment. Mrs. Palin looks to be leaning back in this photo, possibly because she’s chuckling about something funny the Lt. Governor said, or because of a text on her ubiquitous phone. But seriously, one could argue she is tilted back because of the weight and force of a baby belly. Couldn’t that explain her posture? 

BS: I’m glad you asked that, Laura. The photographer who took this picture apparently used a zoom lens at a long setting, thus producing a photo distortion known as pin-cushioning. Look at woman to the right in the photo; you can see that her body is bowing slightly to the left with her head skewing a bit to the right corner. In the case of Palin, the bowing makes her appear to be leaning backwards.

To get a truer sense of what Palin would have looked like if you had viewed her in that scene with your own eyes, I am going to use the “Correct Camera Distortion” feature in Photoshop Elements (the cheaper, home version of Photoshop), and basically add a bit of “barreling” to counter the effect of the pincushion distortion: 

The result gives a truer sense of how those three people would have looked if viewed with your own eyes that day. And while Palin seems to be standing straighter, the alteration did not affect the flatness of her stomach, which I think tells the story.

So what do you think, Laura? Do you believe Palin can be seven months pregnant in this photo? 

LN:  What a great question! I know I need to buckle down and not dither, and I know that this is about health care and job creation, there, also too. But I need to ask a man and I will get back to you (as someone might say).

Seriously, Brad, can’t someone say that any change in a digital picture makes it less authentic, less true?

BS: Well, digital pictures are sometimes not admissible in court (for example, if the original is unavailable) because they are so easily manipulated. So you need to feel confident that the source of a digital picture is trustworthy. This particular picture comes from a major newspaper, so there is no reason to believe it was deceptively altered before it was posted online or published in the paper.

But the answer to your question is an emphatic “no,” altering a digital picture, say, by lightening it, does not make it less “authentic” (whatever that might mean). That’s because all digital photographs have already been processed in various ways before you see them. A cheap point-and-shoot camera makes numerous decisions for the user, such as light level and sharpness. A pro photographer using the “RAW” files captured by her camera must make those decisions herself before generating the pictures. (Back in the old days of film, any print of a picture had to likewise be processed through multiple steps, all of which introduced alterations from the “original,” which was generally a negative.)

Lightening a picture that already has been generated does not affect its “truthfulness” – it just presents a different aspect of the visual truth. The second picture above shows more detail than the first picture, and that is truthful, because in fact a person viewing the scene would have seen those details, since the human eye is much more sensitive than a digital camera. And the third picture is just as truthful as the first (or even more so) because it removes distortion caused by optics – in particular, by a zoom lens; it’s showing the scene as it would have looked to the human eye.

So the question for readers is this: Can you imagine any way Palin in this photo might be seven months pregnant?

LN: For my part, I covered up her head with a piece of paper and tried to look at the photo that way. And I must admit I see no pregnant stomach there. What do Mrs. Palin’s supporters say about this photo? How do they explain it? Because as I’ve said all along on this blog, I am wide open to having a conversation about this.

BS: Palin supporters generally try to ignore or belittle photographic evidence. Julia O’Malley, on April 14, in an Anchorage Daily News article with the headline “Make. It. Stop.” wrote this about my research paper titled “Palin, the Press, and the Fake Pregnancy Rumor”: “I read Scharlott's piece. It contains lots of innuendo and some widely-circulated Photoshopped pictures. What is missing from his investigation: facts.”

Notice her use of “Photoshopped” – the implication is the photos are deceptive. But in the case of the above photo, what deception can she possibly be referring to? The picture comes from her own newspaper! If she wants, she can probably go straight to the photographer who took the picture and get a copy from his or her hard drive, just as it was downloaded from the photographer’s camera.

She wrote that my investigation lacks “facts.” (The paper has over 40 footnotes, so it’s brimming with verified, factual information.) But a photograph is also a “fact.” Can she look at the above picture and honestly say she thinks Palin might be seven months pregnant in it? In her article she wrote that Palin’s baby bump was obvious. What baby bump?

LN:  Allow me to interrupt here and say that “obvious” is the last word I would use about this photo. I don’t know what the truth is, but there is no “obvious” pregnancy here.

BS:  Exactly! In that same vein, I would like to invite Justin Elliot of Salon, who on April 22 wrote an article with the presumptuous headline “Trig Trutherism: The Definitive Debunker,” to exam the photographic evidence presented here. And after he examines it, I’d like to know if he still feels 100 percent sure Sarah Palin was in fact pregnant with Trig. If his answer is yes, then I’d like him to explain what he makes of this photograph.

I have a doctorate in mass communications from a top school in that field, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which means I’m a trained researcher. My research has been published in numerous peer-reviewed academic journals. I teach a senior-level college class on research methods. I’m an empiricist. I believe truth can be discovered and verified. And this picture that we have just examined objectively exists, and its truth value can be assessed. Here’s my bottom line from my examination of the photo: I am at least 95 percent confident that Sarah Palin is not seven months pregnant in that photo.

However, I am not 100 confident. I have no medical training. I do not work with pregnant women as a matter of course in my job. There are many people who can offer a much more authoritative reading of that photo than I can, including you, Laura, who have written so eloquently about your own high-risk pregnancy and the months your child lived in a NICU.  So I am making a request, or rather several requests, of your readers:

1. Would those of you with medical training, especially if it involves working with pregnant women, let me know if you believe Sarah Palin might be seven months pregnant in the above photo? Please let me know your credentials and if I may quote you by name in a follow-up article. If you possess relevant photographic evidence, please send it.

2. Would those of you who have been pregnant at least five times let me know if you, in the seventh month of your fifth pregnancy, looked approximately as slender as Palin does in the above photo. If you could verify your stage of pregnancy (for example, with the date of the photo plus the date that you gave birth), that would be great. Let me know if I may quote you by name and print your picture in a follow-up article. Likewise, if a close relative of yours (your wife, sister, etc.) looked that slender in the seventh month of her fifth pregnancy, let me know and send a picture.

3. If you are a professional photographer who has worked with pregnant women, please share any relevant observations or photographs you might have.

Feel free to post your comments below and I will certainly read them here, and respond, on Laura’s blog. Or if you wish for more privacy concerning your name, etc., you might want to post anonymously below or email Laura on her Contact page. But send your comments plus personal information and/or pictures to me at brad.scharlott@gmail.com.

Thanks in advance for your help.  And Laura, it’s always fun talking with you about this story, journalist-to-journalist.

LN:  Thank you, Brad. And I know that we are going to analyze two more critical photos here on my blog. And I can’t wait to see what you’ve got! 

Donald Trump bows out of Indy 500 pace car role

 

In this file photo dated March 31, 2011 Donald Trump talks to the press after receiving the American Automobile Association's (AAA) Five-Diamond Award for Trump's International Hotel & Tower New York at the hotel.

CAPTION

By Timothy A. Clary, AFP/Getty Images

Donald Trump has decided not to drive the pace car for the Indianapolis 500, but isn't attributing his withdrawal to the recent controversy over his planned role in the race's 100th anniversary celebration.

A press release from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway says Trump begged off because he may be announcing his intention to run for president soon, and that he thought that would make it inappropriate for him to drive the pace car.
"I very much appreciate the honor, but time and business constraints make my appearance there, especially with the necessary practice sessions, impossible to fulfill," Trump is quoted as saying in the press release. "I look forward to watching the race from New York."

COMPLETE STORY: Indianapolis Star

No replacement has been named. Jeff Belskus, Indianapolis Motor Speedway president and CEO, said he understood the decision and that, "From my first conversation, I was impressed by his deep understanding of the event and history, and I thank him for being a true fan."
A Facebook site had begun a campaign to oust Trump from the pace car duty, in part because of the belief that the 100th anniversary race should have a previous winner in that role.