If Only Newspapers Had Stayed Black and White

Oddjob, by way of BlondeSense’s Pissed Off Patricia, points us to this article, in which GOP hack Katherine Harris whines that the media was to blame for her reputation as a fashion victim, not her own dubious cosmetics skillz.

“I'm actually very sensitive about those things, and it's personally painful,'' Harris said when host Sean Hannity asked about her image problems from 2000.

“But they're outrageously false, No. 1, and No. 2, you know, whenever they made fun of my makeup, it was because the newspapers colorized my photograph,'' Harris said.

She didn't explain what she meant by “colorized.''

Asked Tuesday to point to an altered photograph, Harris and her staff could not.

Her response to the question, said spokesman Adam Goodman, was, “I haven't worn blue eye shadow since the seventh grade when I was in the Girl Scouts.'' She didn't name a newspaper that showed blue eye shadow.

Does this eye shadow
look blue to you?

“Manipulating an image in any form is not allowed'' by The Associated Press, which distributes photos to newspapers nationwide, said David Ake, AP national deputy photography director. “We're pretty adamant about that. We have terminated people for it.''

Ake was AP photo editor in Florida during the 2000 recount, “and I can tell you we did no manipulation whatever,'' he said.

[…]

Even some feminists who oppose Harris said she was the victim of a double standard.

“She got the criticism anybody in a political hot spot would get, but what she also got, what women get, is more attention to the things that are different from men,'' said Marie Wilson, of the White House Project, an organization that seeks to advance women in politics.

I agree with that last bit; woman do get criticized for style- and appearance-related issues way more than men, and, in fact, I can’t even imagine a woman who was as overweight as Denny Hastert getting elected, even if she was evidently capable of single-handedly solving the culture war that plagues us, which is truly shameful. So I won’t hold it against Harris that she was upset by such personal criticisms, but I have no compunction whatsoever against mocking her pathetic attempt to blame the media.