This could be pretty funny. The guys over at Talking Points Memo were curious what the hell that building (“mansion” as they first put it) was behind McCain while he was speaking (I’m in Taiwan, so I still haven’t actually seen the speech). After a while, they got an answer, it was “Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, California.” They apparently didn’t think of this right away, but I did the moment I saw “Walter Reed.”
Why did they put up a picture of Walter Reed Middle School? Is it really, as some are insinuating, that they googled “Walter Reed” (the hospital) and got Walter Reed (the middle school)?
I looked at the first 20 pages of google image results for “Walter Reed” this morning, and didn’t see a picture of the Middle school. The GOPpers may have used Yahoo, or had access to a database of “royalty free images” or some such.
Since McCain didn’t mention the school, it’s probably safe to say that the image was a screwup.
I think in a professional setting you not supposed to grab your images from Google but from a proper stock photo merchant. In that case the larger web footprint might not help you as much and without context it seem easier to pick the wrong photo tagged “Walter Reed, building, something, something…”
That whole big screen was a complete mis-fire. Besides getting the wrong building, it played horribly on TV, usually only showing a single color behind the speaker. I am sure it played well in the venue, but on TV it was a complete miss.
Especially when the foreground was mostly grass. At the start I thought McCain was supposed to be in front of a greenscreen. In fact, it’ll probably be pretty easy for those who want to to put some new images behind him. Colbert could have a field day.