Now you see it, but you don't.

It's always been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. News writers are often condemned if even a single world in their article is proven to be a lie. But how much worse is it (or not) if the accompanying photograph is a fake?

More often than not, a photograph is used in conjunction with a news story to illustrate in visual effect what words alone cannot express: humanity. They can illicit a variety of emotions that can color a reader's perspective well before they are able to delve into the article itself. We should all be familiar with these scenes as they all have, at one point, graced the covers of newspapers nationwide: the low angle shot of a plane a split second before colliding with Tower 2 during 9/11, the picture of a military airplane dropping a massive load of bombs and missiles in the middle of Beirut, the burnt carcass of an Iraqi baby being pulled from the ruins after an American air strike.

Out of those pictures, one of them is a fake, or least has been misrepresented to the point where it has detracted from the truth and the reality of the matter. A Lebanon reporter named Adnan Hajj doctored his photos of an Israeli F-16 dropping more bombs than what was actually dropped and described the flares it let off as an additional payload of missiles. He also blatantly (and poorly) doctored a photo of a post-bombed out Beirut to show thicker and blacker smoke than in the original photograph.

In cases like that, it is obvious that trickery was involved to obscure the truth.

But with the advent of digital photography and the dreaded Photoshop, where should the line be drawn that clearly establishes the line between cleaning up and doctoring. After all, for the sake of saving space, pictures are often cropped and cleaned for dust or smudges. Certain angles, shutter speeds, apertures, and light manipulation techniques are often used by photographers to capture the emotion of a certain situation. Where should the clear difference be established?

Personally, I am under the belief that no sort of post-processing technique should ever be employed by photojournalists. What is taken in that moment in time should be observed from that perspective and not by any jaded views that would later alter the spirit of that photograph. Photojournalists have that added responsibility now to make sure their photos are in tune with the spirit of the moment it is taken in. Anything else is a lie and a discredit akin to a reporter falsifying a news source in order to get a story pushed through.