Walter Reed Middle School Makes Special Appearance in McCain’s Speech
September 5, 2008 – 9:40 am by KimLast night thousands of viewers were puzzled over the mansion-like building in the backdrop of McCain’s speech. The image appeared on the backdrop for about five minutes, then faded into an American Flag.
Well, mystery solved – it was a picture of the Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, California.
Now the next mystery is why was Walter Reed the backdrop for his speech anyway? Many people believe that an image of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center was supposed to be featured behind McCain, but one of the tech guys on his campaign goofed and put up a picture of the school.
Nothing in McCain’s speech had anything to do with the school, or any school for that case, and it took technicians five minutes to figure out their mistake.
How could they mess up like that? I did a little experiment and went into Google and typed Walter Reed to see what would come up. The first three search results were for the Walter Reed medical center. There was, however, a related search link at the top that was for the middle school.
Interesting, but I still think it would be easy to determine that McCain would want the medical center, not the middle school.
Due to all the contacts from the press, Walter Reed Middle School will be making a public announcement sometime today to confirm that the building in McCain’s backdrop was in fact their school.
This is the picture that McCain used of Walter Reed Middle School.
And this is the picture of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
3 Responses to “Walter Reed Middle School Makes Special Appearance in McCain’s Speech”
I don’t think this was a mistake because if you look close enough it appears that this is a live video feed. At one point a man is walking into the building, therefore this could not have been a mistake they could not have setup a camera to shoot video at the wrong location.
Go on CNN.com and in Part 1, go to about the 1:30 mark and you will see a man walk up the stairs.
By Andrew on Sep 5, 2008
Walter Reed Middle School is in Los Angeles, and is frequently used as a location for TV shows, movies, and commercials. There is bound to be stock video footage of the school out there that is tagged, “Walter Reed.” So even if this is a video, it doesn’t mean that the campaign shot it. They just grabbed the wrong “Walter Reed.” Still laughing about this one!
By Juvie on Sep 5, 2008
It is clearly a mistake. The Republicans have no love for Hollywood. If they wanted to show a high school they would have picked a red-voting district or a swing district school that had some connection to the campaign. No way they pick a high school in hollywood. It is stock video and eventually someone will find the source.
By David on Sep 5, 2008