Big up her tits!
Victorian MP Georgie Purcell has
hit out[objected] after an edited a picture of her was shown on a commercial television bulletin last night.The Animal Justice Party MP says an image used by 9News Melbourne to illustrate a story about her opposition to duck hunting featured enlarged breasts, while her dress was altered to become a cropped top and skirt.
Seems too conservative. Why not put her in a bikini?
Ms Purcell says it’s an example of the “ongoing, insidious” treatment of female MPs in the media.
9News Melbourne director Hugh Nailon apologised in a statement. “As is common practice, the image was resized to fit our specs,” he said. “During that process, the automation by Photoshop created an image that was not consistent with the original.”
Uh huh and the changes just happened to be in the direction of “make this bitch look hotter.”
As is common practice, the image was resized… from a B cup to a D cup.
Huge Nailon has very particular specs.
I’ve resized many a photo in Photoshop; it never altered the photo, just changed the size. I guess truth is out of style.
This was reported in NZ media yesterday. The excuse is pathetic. Nothing happens to an image in editing without some human interaction. It’s vaguely possible I guess that Adobe has introduced an ‘enhance’ command that carries out a suite of changes including ’sexing it up a bit’. That itself would raise questions a news organisation caught out like that would want to investigate, but apparently not. I’m leaning towards it just being the preference of the human doing the job and sloppiness on the part of their boss.
As an Aussie, it was what we have come to expect from our media duopoly as 9 Entertainment (yes, that is the name of the parent company of not just the TV network but also the owner of what were once two of the best newspapers in the land).
It was fantastic to see Adobe come out and explain that
1. That isn’t how Photoshop works, and,
2. Regardless of what the software does, it still requires humans to approve the image and modify it if necessary.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/jan/30/georgie-purcell-mp-photoshop-automated-image-nine-news-apology-victoria-animal-justice-party
Here’s another bit from the Guardian article:
I have never seen anyone refer to a male politician, especially in the context of an apology, refer to them by their first name. It’s too informal, and in this context comes across as deepening the obvious disrespect. The picture developing here is an organisation with a poor internal culture with regards professionalism and respect.
It appears AI programming bias could indeed have created the image. This is more of a problem than a ‘one bad actor’ situation.
https://archive.is/1ZuJ4
Whilst a human had to give it the OK, that could easily be due to inattention rather than sexism.
Thank you for the link, Simon.