Politics from North of the 49th Parallel
Published on June 14, 2004 By IanGillespie In Politics

At the risk of dragging a horse on stage and literally beating it to death -- another word about ads.

Of particular interest is a single frame of the most recent Liberal attack ad.

The disarmingly entitled "Harper and the Conservatives", now appearing on television, seems to include a brief 'flash' between a shot of a handgun pointing into Canadian homes and a shot of a smog filled industrial town.

Some claim that this 'flash' manipulates the viewer, creating the "subliminal image of the gun being fired at you".

The TV version of the ad, including the flash, can be seen on the Wednesday morning edition of Politics with Don Newman (Act fast, Politics only archives the last week's worth of it's broadcasts).

This one frame appears to be missing, however, from the Windows Media version of the ad, available on the Liberal website (and, below, on this weblog).

Curious.

Upon making this discovery, it seemed to me as though the Liberals were quite content to manipulate and terrify voters, but simply didn't want to leave a copy of this provocative image lying around in cyberspace -- where people could replay the frame, over and over, to be sure of what they had seen.

But on reflection it occured to me view the Quicktime version. Sure enough, 'the flash' is back.

So, either I'm running a hopelessly out of date version of Windows Media Player, or the Liberals produced two versions of this ad -- and conciously decided that the 'gun flash' wasn't over the top?

That brings me to a small request: could a few of the several hundred readers who will visit this blog in the next two days view the WMV version of this ad.

Do I need to upgrade my media player -- or are the Liberals are even more shameless than we thought?


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