The one the mighty Kos himself says "was no accident." You know, the one where:
There was a concerted effort by Clinton's ad people to make Obama look darker, more sinister, and with a wider nose. The evidence is indisputable.
This is the ad that has people so upset:
and here is the original shot, from the MSNBC debate:
Pretty damning, don't you think? Look at that dark skin, that wide nose, it practically screams at you, doesn't it?
But maybe not. You see, Factcheck took a pretty good look at this. What did they find?
Well, let's start with MSNBC's coverage. You saw the TV capture above. But what did MSNBC's own version look like on streaming video?
Darker, isn't it? But why? It has to do with uploading to streaming video.
conversion to Flash format drives up contrast and reduces the mid-range color values that are frequently found in flesh tones and facial detail.
But it's worse on YouTube. You see,
Some of the differences may be due to video compression required by YouTube, which encodes video to Flash format and re-sizes it, using its own required parameters before posting. The Clinton camp may have had one color scheme in its original video and ended up with a slightly different one after YouTube's processing.
Don't believe me? Well, look again at the YouTube version, the one that set off the firestorm:
Now look at the version on Clinton's website, the one that "verifies" her intent. Note that while Obama is stretched out, it is actually lighter than the YouTube version:
Now for the fun part. Here is the same ad, the original, as aired on actual television, at 5:27 p.m. March 3 on station KCEN in Waco, Texas. It is not stretched out, and it is lighter still:
So what is going on here? Well, the ad was not created with the malice so gleefully "proven" here on Daily Kos. Creating it for TV and then uploading to YouTube, rather than specially creating it for YouTube, caused the distortion. Also, the whole thing was shot in rather dull dark colors, like every attack ad since the advent of television. To quote Factcheck again:
in fact, when we compared the frames in the ad to frames from the debate video using the "eyedropper" tool in Photoshop image-processing software, we found that the frames in the Clinton ad are uniformly darker. We found no pronounced difference in the degree to which Obama's skin, as opposed to his tie, his shirt, or the backdrop was darkened.
The real story, though, is not the ad. The real story is the Daily Kos' community's instant acceptance of anything hateful, ugly, or negative about Hillary Clinton. Stop being so blindly hateful that you believe anything negative, even if it comes from Politico, or Drudge, or even NewsMax. THINK. We have reached the point where our incorrect BELIEF about what Hillary did before, even if she didn't, justifies our incorrect BELIEF about what she did now, even if, again, she didn't.
This site is off the rails. Hopefully, when primary season is over it will get its equilibrium back, but that has to start at the top. That means Kos needs to take a few steps back, take a few deep breaths, and stop being so freakin' gullible.
Good night.