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- Catching Criminals with Photoshop ?
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Photo and video analyst Jim Hoerricksuses Digital Forensics to identify subjects.
Over the last few years, a "Fauxtography" epidemic has been steadily infecting the reporting done by many different news outlets. From the infamous Reuters Passion of the Dolls scandal in 2006, to the numerous fake Monster Pig photographs initially verified by the Associated Press and Fox News, it is clear we are living in an age when seeing is no longer believing. Stinky Journalism's Nathaniel Janis recently had the chance to sit down with Jim Hoerricks--forensic analyst with the Los Angeles Police Department--to discuss ways of identifying such photos when they appear and other issues relating to digital photograph manipulation.
- Holy Gallup's Ghost !
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The Sunday before the election, the Director of Pew Research, Andrew Kohut, admitted on NPR's "All Things Considered" what we pollsters have known all along, but have been able to keep out of the general public's consciousness.
It was the polling equivalent of the little child saying out loud, the emperor has no clothes! Except that it was a pollster admitting this truth.
When NPR's Andrea Seabrook asked Kohut why the polls had shown such divergent readings throughout the campaign season, Kohut admitted that pre-election polls simply couldn't be trusted - at least not until just before people actually started to vote!
- Hey, MsM and Bloggers, Dems and GOP:
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Nicole Belle, CrooksandLiars.com, claimed, gotcha!, Apr. 19 08, "Notice Anything? John McCain doesn't wear an American flag pin on THIS WEEK" (Arrows in photos are original to Belle's article. Are they big enough? ) Image source
On Sunday, Oct. 26, Fox News showed The View';s Elisabeth Hasselbeck introducing VP candidate Sarah Palin. Hasselbeck emphasized that Palin wears a flag pin for her son, who serves in the military. Palin reached for her lapel and smiled right on cue, as if she were Hasselbeck';s sidekick modeling jewelry on the Home Shopping Network.
That's fine. But what does the focus on the pin mean for her boss, John McCain, who does not always wear his flag pin? McCain made it clear last October, when he was asked about Barack Obama not wearing a flag pin, that he "doesn't wear a flag pin on a daily basis."
- It's Entertainment; not Polling:
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Special to StinkyJournalism.org
Still wonder what-the-heck those squiggly lines are at the bottom of your CNN screen during the Presidential debates?
David W. Moore, the author of "The Opinion Makers: An Insiders Exposes The Truth Behind The Polls," and former senior editor at the Gallup Poll for thirteen years, will tell you the folly of this pseudo-science.
Mr. Moore lampoons CNN's use of "live Audience Reaction Meters" during the Presidential debates as junk science. He tells you where the 25 year old hand meter technology came from and how it's used in the debates, is completely counter to the concept of focus groups. He writes, [focus groups] are "designed to obtain in-depth responses from the participants, who actually discuss the issues with each other and arrive at more considered views than what polls normally measure."
Moore argues that CNN has presented a 32 member group's reactions to candidates' comments (shown in squiggly lines [0-100 with 0 equaling bad and 100, good]) as representative of American without one scintilla of scientific basis.
Should Americans really care what 32 people from Ohio think?
- CNN's "Thingamajig":
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The similarity of CNN's "Live Audience Reaction" meter to the vital sign monitors in a hospital is unmistakable. Everyone knows from TV --"Doctor, come quickly. Code blue!"-- that flat lines in wave form graphics spell death for a hospital patients. But what the heck do the same flat lines mean for viewers watching the presidential debates?
The "Audience Reaction" meter – three colored lines at the bottom of the CNN News screen during the debates – combined with the enforced audience silence to provide a surprising effect: I felt slightly anxious and kept looking for signs of life.
Was I watching dying patients in the hospital with the mostly flat-lined and smoothly flowing and colorful wave forms? And what exactly was being measured anyway? My busy CNN television screen did not say.