October 6, 2004
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PLANET MORONIA
Tint-Bias at the Veep Debate?
Who’s Lookin’ at
I noticed this last night during the VP debate: something er, rather, peculiar in paradise. During the split-screen shots when it was most noticable, it appeared to me the tint on the Silk Pony (John Redwards) was red and youthful, while the tint on Cheney’s plump visage was well quite, ill and a ralphy green in its presentation. At first I thought it was me being Rather-shy until I saw the yellow timer lights side-by-side light up- and only one of them was yellow. While the middle light for Cheney unmistakably was yellow, the one before Edwards was as red as Christmas. So too, their skin hues. As I watched further I noticed that when Cheney was included in an Edwards wide-shot, he suddenly regained his health and vigor. Cheney’s chair also seemed to bear a grey chromatic warmer than that of the chair assigned the unfortunate task of holding Redwards’ derrière.
While there is no doubt the excuse might be it was that the shots were simply by different camaras that they happend to rush out and buy at Wal-Mart because the really expensive ones they normally use broke before the flight to Cleveland during an illegal profiling incident by airline security, I personally am left asking what the video guys were smoking in the control room. Aren’t they supposed to be “professionals”, able to wow us with their visual flutter?
Anyone know who ran the camera pool for this debate?
UPDATE
A couple excellent bloggers today kinda ribbed me a little and perhaps poked some fun about this post (see comments). In summary, Mishlei wonders where my observations on the content of the debate are. And Jeff of Beautiful Atrocities suggests all the bad air provided by Xanga servers has caused me to start chasing conspiracy theories similar to a certain Lefty blogger the rest of the sphere loves to hate. Naa.
So I’m going to have a little bit more fun with this three-legged red-headed step-child :p. Now this was almost a serious endeavor- to find out why exactly there seemed to be an almost ubiquitous prattle about Cheney looking sick or tired or even near-death etc. -as I believe Brit Hume also commented last night, along with other pundits on Fox after the debate. One radio commentator today, Dallas KLIF’s Greg Knapp even went so far as to open his radio show with, “I was worried Cheney was going to drop dead last night”. Of course, there are many reasons why Greg Knapp is a local radio commentator aside from his looking like a gecko whether in Cheney’s or Redwards’ lighting.
Here is how the ornithoid pursuit went down: Cheney sounded engaged and alive on the radio. Later however I was surprised to hear anything otherwise until I actually watched it. I must admit I began to draw the same conclusion as the above-mentioned TV commentators after seeing the debate myself later that night. That of course is when I saw how sickly pale the Vice President appeared. I thought it was perhaps that he was sickly pale until I noticed those discommodious timer-lights during a split-screen candidate shot. Silliness aside, these differences in appearance seem to have made a powerful impression on some level with the pundits (and perhaps the public’s) perception of the constitution of each of the debaters.
Now that said, we know it’s all academic since this debate is about a 3.2 on an importance scale of 10 and you probably will be admitting to yourselves this is the most interesting thing to have come out of the whole debate, aside from Cheney’s putting the “silk pony” back in its stall. All theories aside, this is the type of thing about which I rarely if ever post, but for the record I believe it’s worth noting, even for its 3.2 point value. Now if I said I knew with any certainty of fact that some libs decided to tweak Cheney’s hue to make it more like that of Chirac’s without having any insider information to that effect - that, would be almost to the level of leftwing lapblogs Andrew or Wonkette. I still maintain it is sloppy camera work and production work to have such dramatic differences in color that people would think the person on one camera looked sick- particularly during a political debate. But then I’m pretty type-A. In today’s climate I think it’s careless.
Maybe it’s my own little pet jihad, but we all get at least one, don’t we?
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PLANET MORONIA
Comments (3)
good observation Martin, but what about CONTENT…waht did they say, or were you so wowed by the tones you couldn’t focus on the rhetoric? :stickdance:
Wombat: I think you’re getting Xanga Fever. Perhaps you’d like to run this little conspiracy theory past Andrew, who’s getting shriller than Elton John zipped into his control top girdle
LOL no. I’m not saying it was done with malice. I am asking if anyone else noticed it and if they find themselves perhaps a little “Rather-shy” as well. Besides, the content of the debate was far too dull compared with the shiny stuff, except that I think Cheney did manage to get Kerry and Edwards’ records back on the table. My point about the tint though is that MSM’s reputation has fallen so badly, one begins to wonder if high-schoolesque behavior wouldn’t be too far out of their field of play.