Things have gone so low that an American President uses fake images against political opponents…
But when critics last week chided Gosar for showing hundreds of thousands of people a faked image of an imaginary event, the fifth-term congressman said they, the “dim witted” ones, were in the wrong. “No one said this wasn’t photoshopped,” he declared. “The point remains … The world is better without Obama as president.”
For ginning up political resentment and accentuating your rivals’ flaws, nothing quite compares to a doctored image. It can help anyone turn a political opponent into a caricature — inventing gaffes, undercutting wins and erasing nuance — leaving only the emotion behind.
Sharing doctored images of an electoral rival is a timeworn strategy of modern politics: In campaign mailers and TV ads, shadowy lighting, sinister music and unflattering facial expressions are so expected as to be cliche. But those tactics are increasingly playing out on the Internet, the most powerful visual medium in history, where they don’t require a campaign’s backing or resources to get attention.
Trolls in the last year have superimposed the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s head onto the body of Democratic Rep. Adam B. Schiff’s father from a family Thanksgiving photo; doctored a Black Lives Matter protest photo with a sign supporting Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to suggest her campaign had attempted the misrepresentation; and changed a photograph to make it appear that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was pointing at a supporter’s shirt that read, “America deserved 9/11.”
On Monday, Trump, who has more than 70 million Twitter followers, retweeted a fake image of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) cartoonishly altered to show them in a turban and hijab. The tweet, which falsely claims that the two most powerful Democrats in Congress have “come to the Ayatollah’s rescue,” has been retweeted more than 17,000 times….
There a sucker born every minute.
The Honorable.P.T. Barnum