There’s no doubt that the Air Force One flight over New York on April 27th was a huge debacle, but there’s one element of the response to it that I find slightly offputting. After all of the fauxtography scandals of the past four or five years, and the left’s invented, but still resonant “plastic turkey” story, wouldn’t the Blogosphere — or at least the starboard side of the Blogosphere beat President Obama like a bongo drum if they discovered that a photo of Air Force One zooming over the Statue of Liberty was a Photoshopped mockup?
That’s one of the topics discussed in the newest segment from PJTV.
My take? I don’t fault the White House for flying AF1 over the Statue of Liberty to shoot some PR photos, but why on earth, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, couldn’t the White House have alerted the New York media before the flight?
Update: In the comments below, “New Caledonia” explains one way the White House could have successfully used Photoshop:
No one would complain if the White House released a Photoshopped image of AF1 with the caption “Photo illustration by Joe Shlabotnik, USAF,” or some such.
As I believe Andrew Ian Dodge suggested to Bill Whittle in the PJTV segment, it sounds like the Obama White House thought it was playing six-dimensional chess with this one, and was thinking about 50 moves ahead instead five or ten, or simply the next logical step.
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