Today, the Denver Post, the Rocky Mountain News, and The Gazette each have an article on the mountain moving mistake in the Bob Schaffer ad.
Only The Gazette noted:
The Colorado Democratic Party and Progress-NowAction, a liberal advocacy group, were quick to jump on the mistake, sending news releases noting that apparently all mountains look alike to Ohio natives like Schaffer.
Both news releases ridiculing Schaffer misspelled Pikes Peak as "Pike's Peak."
Recall that Mark Udall is from Arizona and that his spokeswoman, Taylor West is from Iowa, so recently that the corn kernels are still coming out of her ears.
This isn't the first ad in the US Senate race where out of state stock photos were used. Long ago, when we were still writing on Schaffer v Udall, we wrote a three post essay disassembling a Mark Udall internet ad. In part, we said:
15 Seconds into the commercial (it moves fast) is a photo of Bob Schaffer standing beside a building with a large plaque. Curious minds that might want to know where in Colorado that building and plaque might be will be disappointed to see that a triangular shaped haze with two embedded rectangles has been produced by the animator to make it unreadable. It is funny to see how clear and sharp the photo is to the left of Schaffer's image and how fuzzy it is where the plaque is located.
The triangle shaped haze is a simple white triangle and two rectangles made translucent by the animator and placed in front of the building image. You can see where both rectangles extend outside the hypotenuse of the triangle. This part is very sloppy and cheaply done animation.
The Washington based producers of this deceptive piece of animation couldn't be troubled to find a photo of a Colorado building and weren't honest enough to let the viewer see that. Going out on a limb, we would go so far as to suggest that this building might be located in Alexandria, Virginia, given the unusually large size of the brick and the round object at the top of the photo. In Colorado, brick buildings are relatively scarce due to the easy availability of quarried building materials. We've never seen a building built with oversized brick.
The difference between the two ads: The Mark Udall ad was intentionally deceptive in multiple ways. The ad agency went out of its way to select photographs that conveyed a false picture and needed to be called on it. The Bob Schaffer ad is an honest ad where a mistake was made by an out of state ad agency.
Memo to Dick Wadhams: If you had actually been reading Schaffer v Udall, you might have picked up some good stuff, including a quick response to this little problem.
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