The Washington Post is so exquisitely sensitive to mockery of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that an unflattering image of her became a small scandal. Their headline was "Rep. Stefanik tweets altered photo of Pelosi in GOP fundraising appeal". Reporter Felicia Sonmez sounded the alarm:
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) tweeted a petition and fundraising appeal that included what appeared to be an altered photo of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, drawing a retweet Thursday morning from President Trump.
The tweet marks the second time this week that a House Republican has tweeted a photo that appears to have been manipulated....
The tweet shows a close-up, red-tinted photo of Pelosi, with the lines in the House speaker’s face exaggerated due to the image’s unnaturally high contrast.
The other image was a dishonestly photoshopped image by Congressman Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) putting Ayatollah Khamenei next to President Obama when in fact they never met.
Stefanik's tweet wasn't a fake. It merely included an unflattering image, a "photo illustration." On Twitter, Post critics quickly offered examples of Pelosi's own Twitter account using negative images!
We made the point on NB's Twitter account that The Washington Post plays this game, too, perhaps most memorably in 2016 by putting a mushroom cloud inside Trump's head on the front of the Sunday Outlook section. Others pointed to almost every cover that Time magazine has done with negative images of Donald Trump, most memorably the melting orange faces. Very unflattering.
It's apparently not dishonest or scandalous when liberal publications polish Pelosi's image to flatter her, like her Time cover story, or her Washington Post Magazine cover story. Or the Post pushing a flattering drawing of Pelosi as they touted her as a "fashion icon."
The Post found it just delightful when Pelosi sold T-shirts and tote bags after the last State of the Union honoring herself as the "patron saint of shade" against Donald Trump.
Their "empowering" women's news site The Lily offered this iconic photo illustration:
