The stock photos on the BNP leaflet
The BNP doesn’t get a lot of friendly media coverage, so one of the only ways they can remind people that they are available to be voted for is through their leaflets.
The thing about leaflets is that they are real political artifacts that merit close study. Just as a bag of household trash, if preserved, could tell an archaeologist a thousand years in the future a huge amount about the way we live today, political leaflets and their delivery patterns can tell you more than anyone knows about the internal workings of the parties.
So, over on the newspeak blog, they’ve been using powerful image recognition software to discover that the pictures of supporters on the latest BNP leaflet are in fact stock photographs.
According to some of the commenters on that blog post, this is normal practice in advertising. But that’s not the point. The point is the story and the perceptions of it. This is politics, after all.
If any of you do try to produce political leaflets yourselves, you’d realize how utterly difficult it is — particularly to get the right pictures. So I completely understand the need to cheat. Which is to say you’re giving away more than you can imagine about yourself and how you did it when you distribute a leaflet.
But, in practice, only a few experts can see the clues.
Luckily, with a website like TheStraightChoice.org, there’s more opportunity for the clever people to study the evidence.
And then they can tell the rest of us what they’ve found through the blogs.
For a real state-of-the-art tour-de-force endlessly hounding leaflet deconstruction, there’s no better place to look than Tim Ireland’s Anne Milton sub-blog.
You don’t need to go that far. Just keep a watch out for anything strange. And keep feeding us those leaflets. Thanks.