Webloggin » Update – Atlantic Magazine Blindsided: Lib Photographer Caught Taking Liberties With McCain Photo Shoot

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If, and hopefully when, the mainstream media ends up losing the election for Barack Obama perhaps they can look back on what happened and say to themselves “maybe if we weren’t exposed as the bottom feeding idiots that we are then perhaps we could have fooled the American public into voting for our guy“.

As it stands however getting people that are too stupid by half to admit to having such introspective revelations would be progress in and of itself. Don’t bank on it happening any time soon. Desperate times call for desperate measures and those blinded by desperation rarely see the stupidity of their ways.

Speaking of desperation we now turn our attention to the Obama cheerleaders at The Atlantic where John McCain gracefully agreed to a cover story and photo shoot despite knowing full and well that the lib friendly monthly magazine would likely not be fair or unbiased in its treatment of him and his record. (Read the whole sorted affair of Greenberg’s photo shoot and how she fooled the McCain staffers over at American Digest. The vampire McCain warmonger photo above is one of the warped images that Jill Greenberg manipulated and put on her site before she removed them from the front page after publicity turned up the heat.)

Turnabout is fair play in image I whipped up of Jill Greenberg As is typical of the robotic nature of those on the left The Atlantic contracted from within the left wing collective and brought in celebrity Beverly Hills photographer Jill Greenberg for the shoot. Those of you that watch the antics of left wing sock puppets will recognize Greenberg for her anti-Bush protest where she individually manipulated 40 (*) babies to get them to cry and show emotional anguish which she photographed and assembled into a photo montage. She also protested against criticism of that shoot and tried to intimidate one of her critics by contacting his employer to tattle on his blogging. That Greenberg. (Shown left in my photoshopped rendering of her.)

So here is Jill Greenberg again, hired by friends in kind at The Atlantic to photograph John McCain. But what she didn’t tell McCain staffers is that she faked an overhead light, instead relying on a strobe placed beneath John McCain that would flash in a manner to cast shadows and show McCain in a sinister light; one of them used for the cover on The Atlantic.

This lighting trick is a tried an true tactic, one similar I would imagine to the below the subject lighting used by Greenberg in the photos that captured the faces of the babies she taunted and teased into crying for her anti-Bush protest (one of them pictured here to show the depths libs will go to make a protest, note the dark shadows above the anguished child). She bragged about the move, calling McCain staffers unsophisticated for not recognizing her trickery as if they should have expected some ass from Beverly Hills to try and pull a fast one.

The Atlantic was happy to publish the sinister looking McCain on their cover along side some subliminal messages with unrelated stories about porn and adultery touted on the top left corner of the cover.

But that is not where it stopped. Greenberg also took outtakes from that photo shoot, photoshopped them, and added captions calling a vampire likened McCain a bloodthirsty warmonger, a smiling McCain with a caption saying he called his wife a c$nt to reporters and a lipstick covered McCain with a caption about adultery. Greenberg featured the outtakes on her personal site but removed them after American Digest wrote about Greenberg’s lack of professionalism that was picked up on Memeorandum and written about by up by Newsbusters, Little Green Footballs, Macsmind, Doug Ross and Fausta’s Blog among others.

The photos pretty much say it all. Greenberg is no different and no more creative than a million other Daily Kosmonauts. She just happens to have lucked into celebrity status by blending in with all the other left wing nutballs in Hollywood that pat themselves on the back for repeating and mimicking the unimaginative ramblings and artistic devices used by a plethora of like minded fools.

I’ll leave you with another one of Greenberg’s brilliant works of art. She is at the heart of like minded people that are at the core of Barack Obama’s party base. Not much more to say.

Update I: The story has been picked up by the New York Post. It should be noted that the Atlantic is sticking by its cover, noting that the picture they used was a better portrait than the one that Greenberg wanted to use with big horror movie like shadows.

It appears that Greenberg also betrayed The Atlantic as well, though they were happy to hire her in the first place knowing full well that she is no friend of republicans. Did they know she wasn’t trustworthy?

Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist covering the McCain story, had the following to say:

Like others at the Atlantic, I was appalled to read about the actions of Jill Greenberg, the freelance photographer who took the cover portrait that illustrates my article about John McCain. Greenberg doctored photographs of McCain she took during her Atlantic-arranged shoot, which took place last month in Las Vegas. She has posted these doctored photographs on her website, which you can go find yourself, if you must. Suffice it to say that her “art” is juvenile, and on occasion repulsive. This is not the issue, of course; the issue is that she betrayed this magazine, and disgraced her profession.

[~snip]

I don’t know Greenberg (I count this as a blessing) and I can add nothing to what James Bennet told the Post except to say that Greenberg is quite obviously an indecent person who should not be working in magazine journalism. Every so often, journalists become deranged at the sight of certain candidates, and lose their bearings. Why, this has even happened in the case of John McCain once or twice. What I find truly astonishing is the blithe way in which she has tried to hurt this magazine.

Update II: From NY Post:

Greenberg, known for her heavily retouched pics of apes and babies, boasted to Photo District News that she submitted photos of the Arizona senator to the mag while barely airbrushing them.

“I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she boasted.

Update III: I changed the title of this post to reflect the fact that The Atlantic feels that Greenberg took advantage of them in a manner that they were not aware. No matter how left leaning I feel the magazine is it is not fair to characterize all events in one lump moonbat laden category.

When we contract with photographers for portraits, we don’t vet them for their politics–instead, we assess their professional track records. Based on the portraits she had done of politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger and her work for publications like Time, Wired, and Portfolio, we expected Jill Greenberg, like the other photographers we work with, to behave professionally.

Jill Greenberg has obviously not done that. She has, in fact, disgraced herself, and we are appalled by the manipulated images she has created for her Web site of John McCain.“