I remember standing in the press room at Victoria Park (Ross County's stadium) at half-time, chatting to another photographer while he went through his pictures on his laptop. He stopped at one picture and we both commented that it would have been great if he'd caught the ball in frame. Then I watched in silence as he copied the ball from another picture and pasted it into that one, proudly declaring: "It happens more than you would think."  That picture went off to whichever paper it was destined for and I headed back out for the second half, feeling like I'd been burdened with a dirty secret that I didn't want to know. 

The reason I mention this is to post a link to the Reuters guidelines on how much manipulation their photographers are allowed to do in Photoshop, which in a nutshell is: None at all. With the exception of minor tone adjustments, dust removal and non-misleading cropping, the transmitted photos must be how they came out of the camera. (Thanks to siriusguy50 who posted the link to the Reuters guidelines on the Strobist forum on Flickr.)

Makes you wonder how Reuters regular Adnan Hajj expected to get away with his doctoring of a photo showing smoke plumes over Beirut. It's also worth mentioning LA Times staffer Brian Walski although I still think his editing of an Iraq war photo was a misguided attempt to make an aesthetically 'neater' photo, rather than one that was wilfully deceptive.