The communications head of the Conservative Political Action Conference said on Wednesday that he does not think a Washington Post reporter fabricated an image that appeared to show the conservative organization’s website had mixed up photos of two black Republicans.
The comment was a response to a strange story that played out on Wednesday morning. Ben Terris, a reporter for the Washington Post, initially tweeted a screenshot of CPAC’s site showing a photo of Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) alongside the biography of Dr. Ben Carson. Both men were scheduled to speak at the conservative event this week.
When contacted by TPM earlier on Wednesday, a CPAC spokesman, Ross Hemminger, said he believed the image was “a photoshop” and promised to send the evidence to TPM.
(The organization later posted a link on Twitter to a Google archive of the organization’s website that showed the Carson’s photo next to his bio. Some on Twitter, however, questioned whether the page archived by Google was an accurate representation of what was in fact displayed on the site.)
When contacted by TPM following the organization’s accusation, Terris said the screenshot he captured was authentic and explained how he found it. He also said he didn’t know how to use Photoshop to manipulate an image.
In an article about the incident published later on Wednesday by the Washington Post, a different spokesman for CPAC, communications director Ian Walters, appeared to walk back his colleague’s earlier accusation. Walters said he didn’t think Terris had photoshopped the image.
“It does not appear that Ben was sitting in his bed and Photoshopping this,” Walters said.
Still, Walters told WaPo that skepticism on the Internet is always warranted. He also stated what he knew about the process of uploading the bio photos.
“When we entered it in, we entered Senator Scott’s photo with Senator Scott’s bio,” he told the Washington Post. “When we put in Ben Carson, we put in Ben Carson’s photo with Ben Carson’s bio.”
Hemminger did not immediately respond TPM’s request for comment on Thursday.
Fixed the start of the second sentence. God I love follow-ups, sad most media doesn’t do them anymore.
Why this is even a story is beyond me.
So conservatives are that concerned about a mistake? No wonder they are so weird.
don’t miss CPAC’s Friday’s workshop on ‘No, they don’t all look alike’.
This only remains a story because CPAC first claimed the reporter photoshopped the image. If they had just said sorry it was a simple screw up in creation of the page, this would not have been a story.