While I am not in anyway condoning what happened, I also feel that the reaction has been a bit too harsh and extreme. I worked for a paper for several years and see no real difference between what was done and the cropping that some images get (by editors) before publication to defuse or sometimes to inflame public opinion. Keep in mind that nothing was out and out faked in this picture, he took elements from two images he shoot in the same sequence and edited them together to make a stronger image. One of Gene Smith's most famous pictures in Life magazine was shamelessly manipulated and elements added in the darkroom in his famous Dr. Schweitzer African essay. The only difference was (and it's a big one) is that one passed itself off as straight news where the other was a photo essay, but the secret of the Schweitzer picture was held for many years. I guess as it gets easier to recreate the news we all must be more scrupulous in the way out photos are presented. A man can write a story and edit and polish and rewrite and nothing is said but let a photographer enhance a photo and all heck breaks loose. Reporters get fired, too, for CREATING newstories (and rightly so) but have a lot more leeway in how they present the facts in their stories--it's called slant and is a key element in writing a good piece. Sometimes what is left out is a lot more important than what gets left in a story. In reality it is done all the time, I shot real estate and frequently would move garbage cans out of the way and carefully choose my view point to enhance the property, I even used Photoshop to remove a pop can from the middle of a newly sodded lawn one time. Normally I would have just walked out onto the lawn to move the can but I sank in over my ankles when I tried. The famous Iwo Jima flag raising over Mt. Suribachi photo is a reenactment of an earlier event, also. It got a Pulitzer as I recall. Football fields are often painted green when the grass turns brown. my two cents darkroommike
