Los Angeles-based photographer Peter Duke wants you to know Steve Bannon isn’t the “bleary-eyed drunk” that “60 minutes” would have you believe.
In his first televised interview since leaving the Trump administration last month, Bannon dropped a few bombs, including criticizing Trump’s firing of ex-FBI Director James Comey, but it wasn’t the ex-chief White House strategist’s words that shocked Duke, it was his appearance. Duke said red circles around Bannon’s eyes and “cherry-red lips” are the result of a coloration conspiracy.
“I’ve met Steve Bannon. I know what he looks like,” Duke said in a nearly three-minute YouTube video he created showing how “60 Minutes” could have manipulated saturation and coloration levels to make Bannon look worse on television.
“Steve doesn’t look like the monster that they want you to think that he is,” he said.
Duke, who’s photography website includes albums titled “ Making America Great Again” and “Butthurt Losers” theorized editors increased saturation on the shots of Bannon to accentuate the redness in his skin tone.
His evidence? It’s all in the drapes. Duke compared side-by-side shots of Bannon and interviewer Charlie Rose to show how color could have been manipulated.
Catching shade for his unkempt appearance isn’t necessarily new territory for Bannon, who has been the brunt of the joke by comedians like Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers, who compared his looks to “a helmetless Darth Vader on meth,” and “the discarded skin suit used by the alien from Men in Black.”
“60 Minutes spokesman Kevin Tedesco called Duke’s theory of media bias “nonsense” in a statement to HuffPost.
Media experts were quick to dismiss the theory as well.
“The tendency is to make people look better,” Susan Farkas, a former senior producer for broadcast standards at NBC, and currently a journalism professor at the City University of New York, said to HuffPost. “When I saw the interview, I actually thought he looked better. They smoothed over his skin.”
