  We examine the suggestion that half of the HST Key Project- and
Sandage/Saha-observed galaxies have had their distances systematically
underestimated, by 0.1-0.3 mag in the distance modulus, due to the
underappreciated influence of stellar profile blending on the WFC chips. The
signature of such an effect would be a systematic trend in (i) the Type Ia
supernovae corrected peak luminosity and (ii) the Tully-Fisher residuals, with
increasing calibrator distance, and (iii) a differential offset between PC and
WFC distance moduli, within the same galaxy. The absence of a trend would be
expected if blending were negligible (as has been inherently assumed in the
analyses of the aforementioned teams). We adopt a functional form for the
predicted influence of blending that is consistent with the models of Mochejska
et al. and Stanek & Udalski, and demonstrate that the expected correlation with
distance predicted by these studies is not supported by the data. We conclude
that the Cepheid-based extragalactic distance scale has not been severely
compromised by the neglect of blending.
