Friends of Louise Harel
Good for you with the website rallying anglos to the defence of Louise Harel. Providing a new voice in the election campaign is always welcome. And you’re getting the francophone media to use anglo headlines, which is always a plus.
Here’s the thing: Maybe people would believe you more about the surge of Montrealers from ethnic communities who have come out in support of her if the pictures on your website weren’t stock photos from a U.K.-based stock photo service.
These aren’t Montrealers, nor are they friends of Louise Harel, so why are there pictures of them on your website? Does Harel not have enough real friends that you’ve had to import pictures of fake ones?
UPDATE (Oct. 5): And I see you’re also plagiarizing blog posts. (Original, FOLH version)
Great find! It looks like the use of stock photos is quickly on the rise, like the city of Toronto fiasco and others… And what would you expect when there’s pressure on site developers to put something out quickly.
Bravo – how did you ever pin down those photos to a specific stock service?
Took a lot of searching. But keywords like “diversity” and “business” and “circle”, combined with Google Image Search helped quite a bit. Stock photos are heavily keyworded.
Excellent find! Have you, or do you intend to, share this information with local media, both French and English?
Local media read this blog, they can do what they want with the information.
the irony is too much :o))
Regarding the photo, great investigative work. However, what’s the big deal with using a stock image? Marketing brochures and corporate annual reports are full of these kinds of images, and nobody believes they’re anything but stock shots — and you can tell they’re stock shots a mile away.
Setting up a custom shot like that would have cost at least $1000 and would have been tricky to schedule (eight busy “real” friends, all in the same place at the same time, with half a day to spare?) Why do that when for fifty bucks you can use a stock shot?
I’m neither for nor against Louise Harel. I just think this find of yours, while clever, doesn’t amount to much.
I’m more likely to criticize the headline. “Fair play for Louise Harel, She’s a good friend to allophones, She’s a good friend to allophones”
WTF? What is that supposed to mean? The repetition of “allophone” is meaningless, and the capitalization on “She” is incorrect (two times!). Is one of those “allophones” supposed to be “anglophones.”
Why not just use no pictures at all? Someone paid money for these stock photos. Less than what you’d pay a professional photographer, but not zero. And they give the false impression that these people support her, when clearly they don’t. You and I can easily pick them out as stock photos, but laymen might think a picture of faces next to “friends of Louise Harel” might indicate that they’re friends of Louise Harel.
I actually agree with you, more because this website wasn’t setup by the campaign itself but some supporters. But it’s getting some attention. And I think there’s a lesson here for political campaigns: don’t put pictures of people you don’t know on your website.
The headlines are bad, the formatting is bad, the texts are copy-pasted (in some cases with attribution, others not). All of these things make it seem as if the website is updated by amateurs who aren’t quite sure how the Internet works.
They are careful never to mention any other parties their candidates may have been associated with for close to 40 years, say, but do proudly allude to any time spent as MPs in Ottawa (shhh… don’t mention it was with the Bloq Québecois), or MPPs in Québec City (shhh… don’t mention it was with the Parti-Québecois). This whole campaign is about Harel trying to create a separatist organizational beachhead on the island of the money and ethnic votes. Didn’t Parizeau once say something about lobsters in a pot?
1) Why are there no non-stock photos of any kind (Louise Harel, Montreal, etc) on the site?
2) It say Louiseharel09.com (though the zero looks more like a degrees symbol) in the banner, which is exact clone LR website.
With “friends” like these, who needs enemies?
You must really detest her because she doesn’t speak the same language as you.
This isn’t very tolerant, Fagstein.
Louise Harel? I don’t detest her. And this post isn’t about her, it’s about a website setup by an anglo supporter of her candidacy.
André Lavallée is the biggest separatist of all. He is running with the Union Montreal banner. Maybe Harel will do better for Anglos.
neo-Montrealers – Gerard Tremblay, We Will Not Forget
I have yet to endorse any of the candidates for this year’s municipal election, buy one thing is certain, I will not be casting my vote
for Mayor Gerald Tremblay. Being a resident of the Plateau-Mont-Royal neighborhood, I was outraged when Gerald Tremblay took a hard liine autocratic stand on the Park Avenue name change fiasco. I quote “Along with other north-south arteries in Montréal, …Avenue du Parc are marked by the presence of numerous neo-Montrealers”.
According to the online Webster dictionary definition of neo:
Neo: 1 a : new : recent b : new and different period or form of : in a new and different form or manner c : New World d : new and abnormal
“neo Montrealer”. I am a Montrealer and proud to be one. Gerard Tremblay seems to have a hidden disdain for for the cultural communities. This is probally why Gerard Tremblay has no friends in multicultural Montreal.
BYE, BYE, Tremblay
I remember this very clearly. Gerard Tremblay needs to know that our memories are more than 365 days long. If he treated us this way once, we will do it again.
Tony
You should also be outraged with the fiasco that was the revamping of St. Laurent blvd. Many beloved places were forced to close down. And Helen Fotopoulos’ “when you make a omelet, you have break some eggs” remark about it. Why do you think she’s running far from the Plateau this time?
I am definately outraged about that too. The Montreal-nord riot is also cause for outrage. It was totally mismanaged.
Tony
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