The Breakfast Meeting: Romney Caught on Tape, and Detecting \'Photoshopped\' Images

September 18, 2012, 9:58 am

By NOAM COHEN

Secretly taped comments, in which Mitt Romney said that nearly of half of Americans were dependent on government assistance and felt entitled, were released by the liberal magazine Mother Jones on Monday and threatened to derail the Romney campaign as it tried to redefine its message 50 days before the election, Jim Rutenberg and Ashley Parker wrote. Speaking to wealthy donors at a Florida fund-raiser in May, Mr. Romney said “47 percent of the people” will vote for Mr. Obama “no matter what,” adding that they are “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them.”

• Late Monday, Mr. Romney decided to respond to th e comments in a hastily arranged news conference that, as it happened, interrupted a fund-raiser in Costa Mesa, Calif., Michael Barbaro writes. Mr. Romney stood by the substance of his comments, but allowed that parts were “not elegantly stated.” Journalists were summoned suddenly, creating an odd scene: “Well-dressed donors, sipping wine, stared at the journalists now traipsing through their event in confusion.”
• The journey of the video to mainstream news included the assistance of James Carter, a grandson of former President Jimmy Carter, who lists himself as “oppo researcher” on his Twitter bio, Michael D. Shear and Michael Barbaro report. He told New York magazine that he had helped find the videos and connect David Corn of Mother Jones with the anonymous owner of the tape. He is credited with “research assistance” on the Mother Jones Web site.
• On BuzzFeed, there are more details of how the video came to wider attention.

The ve nerable Internet Archive in San Francisco is trying to create an archive of all TV news, and on Tuesday visitors to the site will be able to search through 350,000 separate news programs made since 2009, Bill Carter writes. The material will be coded with closed captioning, allowing a visitor to search for keywords within a time frame. Copying TV news is protected under copyright law, and the plan of the archive's founder, Brewster Kahle, is to keep adding older material. Among the many news outlets available are CNN, Fox News, NBC News, PBS and “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central. Those kinds of shows could benefit, too, Mr. Kahle said: “Let a thousand Jon Stewarts bloom.”

A Dartmouth professor who is the leading expert in detecting the digital manipulation of photographs - so-called “Photoshopping” - has created a start-up with a former executive at Adobe, the maker of the software Photoshop, that will sell products to help analyze photos for manipulation. The core market for such a product, Steve Lohr writes, will be law enforcement agencies and news organizations, who have the keenest need to understand the provenance of a photograph; the Department of Homeland Security and The Associated Press were among the beta testers on the product, which is priced at $890 with an annual fee for updates.

The one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street was celebrated on Monday by a protest march in Lower Manhattan. Marchers went past a police blockade that prevented them from reaching Wall Street, Colin Moynihan reported. By Monday evening, 181 people had been arrested; the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press said that five journalists had been arrested during first-anniversary protests.