Gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe’s campaign distributed a piece of literature in African American communities throughout Hampton Roads Sunday that appears to contain a photoshopped image of McAuliffe and President Barack Obama. See for yourself. (Click to enlarge. Or take a look at this pdf.)
We’ve seen the effect of this type of thing before. The unfortunate part is that far too many voters will see the photo and not realize it isn’t real. Combine that with the words beneath (which are cleverly placed to make it appear that McAuliffe was the national co-chair of the Obama campaign) and the picture of McAuliffe and Congressman Bobby Scott on the reverse, and you can see how the piece could be effective.
Despite the fact that we all wish voters were better informed and wouldn’t fall for such stuff, truth is they aren’t and they do. (That’s a post for another day and one I’ve been meaning to write for a while.) Until and unless penalties for misleading voters are implemented, this kind of thing will get worse and worse.
And we wonder why more people don’t get involved in politics.
UPDATE: As mentioned in the comments, the McAuliffe campaigns denies that the picture is photoshopped and emailed me a copy of the photo. 
I have done nothing to it except save it to my computer and upload it here. (Click to enlarge.)
I’m no photography expert, so things like metadata and such are outside of my expertise. If anyone wants a copy of the photo, please use the contact link to email me.
(I’ve been in meetings all morning and am just getting to this.)
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
If voters are dumb enough to fall for this so be it. Where does the nannystateisim stop. Want to outlaw most ads on kids TV for promoting sugar to kids or what about the alcohol commercials showing beautiful people.
Its a terrible ad. I should be governor of Virginia because I went to a bunch of rallies and supported the democratic candidate for President. Right… that doesn’t say anything about governing or where you stand on issues.
Wait a minute… Isn’t Moran arguing he should be governor because he has been campaigning for Virginia pols for years traveling across the state.
Its a stupid argument from any candidate. Elect me because I travel around to campaign rallies and occasionally donate some money and make a few GOTV phone calls. Please.
Vivian,
This is completely false. The photo was not photoshopped. It is 100% real. I emailed you the original file earlier this morning.
Please correct this post.
Thank You.
[Disclaimer: I work for Friends of Terry McAuliffe]
For being ‘real’, this photo looks like Terry is looking past Obama somewhere else in the room.
Is this the best photo you could find of Terry and Obama? Something smells fishy, and it’s not the bait.
I suppose you’d believe we photoshopped all of these photos?
Please, this is ridiculous. They are all 100% real.
[Disclaimer: I work for Friends of Terry McAuliffe]
Eli
Your comment went to my spam filter due to too many links.
They did this in the Virginia Beach mayors race.
I hope tomorrow the voters of Va will use their minds.
The hard working progressives of Va are being duped by a huckster.
Don’t let it happend to you.
Give us a little background, then, Eli. What event was this? When and where were these photos taken? Who was the photographer?
The blogger comments that a picture of President Obama and Mr. McAuliff “appear” photoshopped and then continues on to hope voters not fall for misleading information like this. The next post, the blogger admits to not being a photography expert.
This is wreckless politics! PROVE the photo is incorrect first, then comment on it being misleading.
I agree with Delores. Vivian I respect your blog, but to assume an a picture is photoshopped without any proof crys foul.
Also, the whole purpose for any commercial and/or ad is to influence people. the creator can not and should not assume the relative knowledge of every reader. Their job is to persuade. There is nothing wrong with his ad. We can not legislate stupidity or lack of awareness.
Vivian:
I actually thought it might be photo shopped until you posted the one provide by the campaign and now I must say it does look like it was a real picture. I must say, I look like a loon in all the pictures I have had made with important folks myself. But really, I am disappointed that you are feeding on this negative campaign frenzy anyway!
Though I am not supporting McAuliffe, I do have to say you can’t say something was photoshopped when you don’t know for sure. This piece is pretty slippery. The wording on it though taken verbatim is misleading and makes you think Terry ran the Obama campaign. I understand Terry is one hand trying to appeal to African-American voters and to combat the Moran’s focused attack on Terry’s support for Hillary. I wish we could just focus on issues instead of frivolous things like this. Both Moran and McAuliffe have led the shift from the issues. This may explain why Deeds is surging ahead and has all the momentum while Moran is falling.
Though Obama looks distracted, that is par for the course in the chaos of a campaign. Particularly the black and white clasped hands would seem to have been difficult, if not impossible, to photoshop.
I couldn’t say if the picture was “photoshopped” per se (ie. altered) but as someone with some image processing experience I can say it’s definitely NOT an original JPEG straight from a digital camera. It’s missing a lot of EXIF data and it says “Adobe Photoshop” right in the tags, so at some point the photo was loaded into and saved from Photoshop. Perhaps it was only cropped but calling it an “original” sounds dubious. Just my 2 cents.
That’s what I saw in the data as well.
OK, the large photo on this site has the tag “Adobe Photoshop CS Macintosh” and “2008:12:22 17:45:20”
However, the matching photo on Flickr, 3607037147, has the tags “Copyright (c) 1998 Hewlett-Packard Company” and “IEC http://www.iec.ch” IEC is the International Electrotechnical Commission.
Two others have “LEAD Technologies Inc. V1.01” and one, where Obama and McAuliffe are embracing, has “Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated”.
(LEAD Technologies produces imaging software development toolkits — I worked with their LEADTOOLS Imaging SDK many years ago.)
Yes, but no one ever uses an original JPEG straight from a digital camera on any final document to be printed. (I used to be in the graphic design and printing business, so trust me on this). If Terry’s campaign was making a mailer in Adobe’s desktop publishing software (industry standard in printing), which is InDesign, it’s more correct to put the pic through Photoshop, correct the colors, play with dpi, crop it, save it as a .psd and then link it to whatever Indesign document they were creating the mailer in. That’s how any graphic designer would do it, and that’s how a printshop prefers to get those kinds of documents sent. In addition, I’d add that any photographer worth his or her salt corrects photos in Photoshop afterwards, at least for color. It isn’t an “original” but the original is unusable as an original.
To my eye after a five second comparison, it was cropped, the color was corrected (look how red T-Mac’s face and hair were in the original), desaturated, T-Mac’s red eye was eliminated, and the dpi was lowered significantly. I think I may spot a wee bit of nip/tuck around Terry’s jawline and a bit of skin smoothing as well, but the camera really does add 10 pounds, and bad lighting can make anyone look older (Terry “Blanche Dubois” McAuliffe?), so I can’t fault him that.
The quote by Daschle was deliberately placed that way. To me, it is a clear attempt at deceit.
Absurd to expect Vivian to be a ‘expert’ just to make a comment. I have watched and followed this race, and honestly, assume that anything Terry does is phony, just based on common sense. I am an “expert” in common sense and am deeming those questioning Vivian’s honest evaluation to be lacking! I’m with you Vivian, anything Terry does is suspicious and lets hope Virginia voters aren’t duped by his game!
I voted today, and I didn’t vote for the phony-baloney-terry. I voted for someone who has worked in Virginia, has been involved in Virginia and has been a part of Virginia’s legislative process for many years! This automatically eliminates Terry!