"The jacket was charcoal, not maroon; the shirt was light blue, not pink..."

The NYT has quite a correction today:

The cover photograph in The Times Magazine on Sunday rendered colors incorrectly for the jacket, shirt and tie worn by Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor who is a possible candidate for the presidency. The jacket was charcoal, not maroon; the shirt was light blue, not pink; the tie was dark blue with stripes, not maroon.

The Times's policy rules out alteration of photographs that depict actual news scenes and, even in a contrived illustration, requires acknowledgment in a credit. In this case, the film that was used can cause colors to shift, and the processing altered them further; the change escaped notice because of a misunderstanding by the editors.

Here's the original article with a tiny version of the photograph. (Today's correction is preserved there.) I've got the original magazine in front of me, and I can tell you the depiction of Warner is simply horrifying. When I first saw it, I was mesmerized by how they made him so unattractive, so ridiculous. I was fixated on the big Chiclet-teeth and didn't notice the jacket was maroon and the shirt pink. The effect of those things was purely subliminal. But making a man's blue shirt pink? Why do that? In the hope of reaching some unguarded, homophobic part of the reader's mind? Maroon jacket? No competent politician would ever wear a maroon jacket! You're reaching into our heads and making us think he's weird and untrustworthy.

There's still no explanation of how they got his whole face to look so bizarre. Here's how people who like him present him.

UPDATE: The Anchoress blames Warner:

[H]e should have known better. The New York Times Magazine has madea habit of putting deplorable, awful, really cheesy pictures on its front cover when it comes to two sorts of people: Any Republican, and Anyone Who Might Run Against a Clinton.

But isn't the article pretty positive? And doesn't the NYT Magazine routinely publish strange photographs of celebrities' faces? It wasn't long ago that they made George Clooney look like an alien! Here's something I wrote in the comments to this post:

I think someone over at the magazine just believes in anti-flattery for the celebrities that other magazines cater to. I think they want to make us laugh [at] and not fawn over the big shots. It's like caricature, but done with photography.