uno

The Daily Show for you old fogies:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...ccain-acc.html

McCain Uses Walter Reed Middle School, Not Army Hospital, as Backdrop


(link hotten)

In the run-up to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama was mocked mercilessly by John McCain's campaign staff for the grandiose stage set-up where he was scheduled to accept his party's presidential nomination.

Now it's the Democratic bloggers' turn.

Some watching McCain's nomination acceptance speech Thursday night wondered whether he was asking to be mocked when the screen turned green behind him as he spoke.

McCain became the butt of jokes online and on the The Colbert Report this June after delivering a speech in Louisiana where the stage backdrop was a nauseating green. That spawned Stephen Colbert's "Green Screen Challenge" to make McCain's presentation more exciting. Some of the rather entertaining results can be seen below.

This time around, the green that television viewers saw behind McCain was actually the lawn of the Walter Reed Middle High School in North Hollywood, the name of which can be seen faintly in this picture.

While the giant Hibino video screen was probably meant to give all the delegates within the stadium a sense of context for the proceedings, for many it turned out to be a giant distraction for television viewers.

As some posters on this audio visual experts' forum note, the stage designers probably should have thought more about how the background screen would affect television viewers' experience of the speeches during close-up shots since they're the prime audience.

And as for the use of Walter Reed Middle High School's image in the background? Neither the McCain campaign nor the convention organizers could be reached at the time of this posting. Bloggers suspect that the image that was meant to have been projected was the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, which would have made more sense since McCain spent a good deal of time talking about his injuries in Vietnam.

The high school's principal Donna Tobin declined to comment about the use of the school's image, but issued this statement, suggesting that she wasn't happy about it, on the school's blog:

?It has been brought to the school?s attention that a picture of the front of our school, Walter Reed Middle School, was used as a backdrop at the Republican National Convention. Permission to use the front of our school for the Republican National Convention was not given by our school nor is the use of our school?s picture an endorsement of any political party or view.?

Nevertheless, it's probably the McCain campaign that's having the last laugh.

Green screen or no, television audience measurement firm Nielsen says that the final night of the Republican National Convention drew 500,000 more viewers than Obama's spectacularly-staged nomination speech did: More than 38.9 million people watched McCain's speech while 38.4 million viewers watched Obama on the final night of the Democratic National Convention.

Update: Josh Marshall has an update here.

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GigoloShawn

That's an awesome middle school. Mine was brick and snot.

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uno

OMG now they showed a guy saying they are achieving victory when the screen changed to a cemetery!

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nnweb

80000 of those 500000 where watching live.

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