WorldNetDaily: USA Today gives Condi 'demon eyes,' pulls photo

I have waited until now to comment on this, because I wanted to see how everyone else would react to this. Now I can report that Michelle Malkin, one of the first to report this outrage, is either under "Distributed Denial-of-service Attack," or, as seems more likely, swamped with honest requests for information. I'll go ahead and link to her site, but it will be awhile before you'll be able to get through.

But in the meantime, here is WorldNetDaily's article, containing thumbnails of Condi Rice's photograph, before and after that disgraceful alteration. Here also is the link to The Pen, a less-well-known blog who actually got in first.

So what did USA Today do? Basically, they took a photograph which, they said, was too dark to go on their Web site. I will not vouch for this. Go see the original AP photograph and judge for yourself whether it needed any alteration at all.

The accompanying caption says that Secretary Rice was "looking on" at a diplomatic transaction in Moscow. So USA Today said that they brightened up the photograph. They didn't just "brighten it up" all over. They artifically brightened the whites of her eyes, to the point where they appear to shine with an otherworldly light that recalls Actress Kate Nelligan as Lucy Seward in the 1979 version of Dracula. Worse yet, they narrowed her pupils to vertical slits, to make them look like those of a cat--or perhaps Bast, the catlike goddess of ancient Egypt.

USA Today tries to deny that this was deliberate. Tellingly, they yanked the photograph from their own site--but not before The Pen and WND picked it up. They then said that they tried to brighten it up, but the result was "not up to our editorial standards"--but why, then, did they publish it in the first place? No less than three professional graphic artists have all said that this was no accident--because they could not duplicate the effect with any innocent adjustment of the brightness setting in Adobe Photoshop, the favorite digital photo-retouch program among all the media.

The Democratic Party and their Fishwrap Axis of willing accomplices in the media must be pretty desperate. If that is how they really and truly see Condi Rice, I pity them. But I wouldn't give two cents for their "editorial standards" after this.