Corbett campaign's website gets real - photos of supporters, that is

Gov. Corbett's campaign pulled the image of a smiling black woman from its website Friday after the news organization BuzzFeed reported that she was not a real supporter - but, rather, a model whose image was lifted from a stock photograph.

The new "footer" image on the bottom border of the website features people posing with Corbett in an office. A spokesman stressed that they are actual supporters of the governor.

"We changed the photo to prevent Tom Wolf from using trivial matters like website graphics as a distraction to avoid talking about why he refuses to release any details about his . . . plan to triple the state's income tax rate," spokesman Chris Pack said.

Corbett, trailing in the polls, has hammered his Democratic rival for suggesting he wants to make the wealthy pay more and cut income taxes for the middle class without giving specific numbers.

BuzzFeed found the model's image in a photo titled "Financial Adviser Talking to Senior Couple at Home," sold by iStock, a service of Getty Images. She also appears in scenes such as a family Thanksgiving dinner on the site Shutterstock.

Wolf's website, too, has photos of people with the candidate - but "everybody is a real person and nobody has been Photoshopped in," spokesman Jeff Sheridan said.

Pack, the Corbett spokesman, said "it is not an unusual practice for campaigns to use stock images in their website graphics."

Last month, it was the Wolf campaign's turn to be embarrassed. A Wolf supporter filmed in a TV ad extolling the candidate's Peace Corps service turned out to be a lawyer-actor who played "Mr. Cannibal" in a low-budget torture movie called Breeding Farm.

It was BuzzFeed, too, that disclosed Alan Binyak's role in the film, in which women were kidnapped, tortured, and eaten.

The Wolf campaign pulled the ad.