Breitbart Blogger Dan Riehl on the Trail of a Bombshell Obama Photoshop Phraud
Today, breitbart.com ace blogger Dan Riehl tweeted the latest conspiracy theory to hit the wingnut blogosphere:
RT @AureliusPundit: Did White House dr Photo of President “Throwing” Football?- tinyurl.com/cdg8z7c
— DanRiehl (@DanRiehl) May 21, 2012
The link goes to “Pundit Press,” where “Aurelius” is analyzing the pixels in a photo tweeted by the White House…
Photo of the Day: President Obama throws a football @soldierfield after the @NATO dinner in Chicago: twitter.com/whitehouse/sta…
— The White House (@whitehouse) May 21, 2012
The Kenyan impostor can’t slip such an obvious fake past the “I AM BREITBART” army, of course.
“Aurelius” zooms in on his screenshot of this tweet (which measures, by the way, 471 x 318), and discovers … yes, the dreaded PIXELLATION! Proof of photoshop doctoring!
Why would the President want to fake a photo like this? Well, that’s not what Aurelius is interested in - he’s just asking questions!
Note the pixelation that occurs around the entirety of the President’s head. Such deterioration does not exist anywhere else (at least so obviously) in the photo. Also note Mr. Obama’s oddly large eyes. Additionally, President Obama is inexplicably looking upward, unless his target is sitting somewhere in the cheap seats 100 yards away. …
So, is this picture doctored? It’s up to you to decide. However, the fact that the White House may have altered a picture of the President throwing a football speaks to how despereate [sic] they are to perfectly manicure his public image.
Rather than post a lesson in how JPEG compression works and why a freaking screenshot of a low res image on Twitter would be expected to have exactly those kinds of compression artifacts, which would be wasted effort, I’ll just direct any wingnuts who really want to search for an EXCLUSIVE BOMBSHELL SCOOP to the original photograph from the White House in their Flickr photostream, at a resolution of 4000 x 2760. (h/t: Gus.)
At the top of this post is a somewhat zoomed-out clip of the section in question, saved at fairly high quality. Happy pixel-hunting!