As many of you know, Laura Novak, a fine journalist and soon-to-be novelist, has posted several written “conversations” with me over the last month or so, on a variety of topics stemming from my paper titled “Sarah Palin, the Press, and the Fake Pregnancy Rumor: Did a Spiral of Silence Shut Down the Story?” In these conversations, she asks me questions about my research, and then I ask her questions, since she, as a former high-level print and broadcast reporter, can represent the views of the press. Last Wednesday, she posted the fifth installment, in which we discussed questions relating to digital picture manipulation in general, plus this picture in particular:
Many of you are without doubt familiar with the picture; it shows Palin on March 14, 2008, nine days after she announced she was seven months pregnant, looking amazing un-pregnant. The point of the conversation was that, even though the picture above has been lightened and corrected for camera distortion, there is no reason to question the veracity of the key revelation of the picture, which was that her stomach was absolutely flat.
After Laura posted our conversation, I wondered if the key idea might be made even better using a comparison. So I googled “seven months pregnant” and found the famous Vanity Fair cover showing a nude but discreetly covered Demi Moore pregnant in her seventh month, which led me to create this graphic:
I sent this graphic to Gryphen at Immoral Minority, who posted it the next day, Thursday. (I also sent it here, and it gave Kathleen a big laugh.) I then emailed Andrew Sullivan about the graphic and the conversation, and he quickly linked to both under the simple headline “Sarah and Demi” and text that read “Compare and contrast. More here.” Since Sullivan has a zillion readers, many eyeballs viewed flat-belly “pregnant” Sarah for the first time plus read the conversation about the picture.
Yesterday, Laura placed the Sarah-Demi graphic in her blog, right above our conversation. Then the Business Insider news site picked up both.
Later the Wall Street Journal linked to the Business Insider article.
This morning I found the Business Insider story and graphic has been linked by One News Page, a global news aggregator. It would seem that the graphic is spreading like wildfire.
So how many new eyeballs have seen the graphic and learned about the pregnancy controversy? How many people worldwide read One News Page, and how many additional sites are going to link to it?
Significantly the point is that our collective efforts are bearing fruit.
This morning I turned in my grades, thus finishing my spring semester. I will teach a summer class, but that comes in June. So I have a lot of time right now to dream up graphics and articles and, who knows, maybe some billboards. Let’s all keep at it. Send me your ideas:
brad.scharlott@gmail.com
