A spokesman for the Conservative Political Action Conference said on Wednesday that an image posted to Twitter by a Washington Post reporter earlier in the day, which appeared to show the CPAC website had mixed up photos two black Republicans scheduled to speak at the event, was fake.
“It’s a photoshop,” CPAC spokesman Ross Hemminger told TPM by phone when asked about the image.
The image had been tweeted out by Washington Post reporter Ben Terris at 8:33 a.m. ET on Wednesday. Terris’ post said the CPAC “mobile app” had placed a photo of Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-SC) alongside the biography of potential presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson.
Whoops… Looks like the CPAC mobile app has confused @SenatorTimScott for @RealBenCarson pic.twitter.com/bevHJRzx0g
— Ben Terris (@bterris) February 25, 2015
Hemminger disputed that CPAC had made an error.
“I’ve spoken with the web people who verified that it was definitely photoshopped,” Hemminger said, promising to send evidence that the image was a fabrication.
By noon on Wednesday, Hemminger had not sent such evidence. (TPM will update if he does.)
Reached by phone, Terris told TPM that the image “definitely was not a photoshop.” He said it was a screenshot he took himself and that he did not receive it from another person.
“I just was checking to see when Ben Carson was scheduled to speak at CPAC, and I saw his bio,” he said. “That’s literally all I was thinking: ‘That’s not the right guy.'”
“I don’t know anything about Photoshop, anything about web design,” he added.
On Wednesday, CPAC also posted a link on Twitter to a Google archive of the “speakers” section of its website. The version of the page captured by Google was from Tuesday at 3:59 a.m. GMT, which would have been 10:59 p.m. EST on Monday. The Google version displayed an image of Carson next to his bio.
Note to media: We did NOT mix up @SenatorTimScott and @RealBenCarson. See Google cache of page in question: http://t.co/atHOwwYB8l
— CPAC (@CPACnews) February 25, 2015
At about 11:30 a.m., RedState.com editor Ben Howe also accused Terris of photoshopping the image:
I don’t even slightly believe this isn’t a photoshop. https://t.co/jJb5UnmWkI
— Ben Howe (@BenHowe) February 25, 2015
@KevinWGlass @MikeRiggs @politicalmath @BenHowe Think what you want about my quality as a journalist. I have no idea how to photoshop
— Ben Terris (@bterris) February 25, 2015
This post has been updated.
