Actually, The AP was the first one to make that stupid statement public, and we should definitely send some major flak their way for making it. FactCheck could have taken it off the AP wire...but they are also stupid for saying it and making forgeries.
"We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding."
It seems they did not follow "the best practices of both journalism and scholarship" and certainly did not investigate "the factual accuracy of what is said " in this case.
I would like to commend you on your effort and very good research.
Several months ago, myself and a friend of mine noticed immediately the CoB posted on Fight the Smears was a glaring fake.
He and I both first noticed the grey/white pixilation between the characters after zooming in.
I immediately knew why this was. I have forged several images (not CoBs though).
The granulated dithering and pixilation is due to two image layers. There was an original background image with the native text.
Because you can’t convert back a JPG or GIF to an editable image format, the original scan must stay JPG.
So, to forge, you have to use the clone tool to cover the existing text with the native background colors.
This is where the problem occurs. Because the graphics editor doesn’t have the original layer in an editable format (i.e. fireworks png etc.), it “guesstimates” the color correction with a color correction algorithm.
Because it can’t quite make a perfect color match (not the original layer), it just dithers or attempts to get as close as possible, which is pretty good to the naked eye.
When you zoom in though, it jumps right out at you, because you are viewing the pixels up very close.
So, the image was done in least two layers. The original scanned image and the text overlay.