I'd just woken up so I didn't qualify this as much as I should have, all though the tl;dr is just the three words above.
Newspapers are based around a mission of delivering facts (or at least the facts they want to share), and when that core rule is violated the inherent trust is broken. So when someone is misquoted, a story manufactured and so on then the journalists have failed, are fired and cast out of the community (mostly). Photography was one of the biggest changes to news reporting as it allowed facts to be visually disseminated as well, but because they're essentially a snapshot of the moment as it had happened modification of almost any kind was immediately held up as a no-no.
Some newspapers are getting a bit more progressive, but every 3-6 months in the photography community there's a discussion regarding whether the tools photographers use should be allowed in photojournalism, or whether in the central mission of delivering the truth photo modification, even in a trivially form, is counter as how can you say the changes haven't gone further.
Rather astonishing that they would adhere to "ethics" so strictly with regard to images, when the written journalism is so often slanted, sloppy, and/or incomplete.
Generally yeah, but in this case? If they 100% knew for a fact that the sky above his head was black, then adding some black padding is fine. Maybe not from a photography standpoint, but from a journalistic one? Come on..
This is why it's so contentious, it improves the photo but it's no longer original. Oddly from a photographic side that's fine, but photo journalistic standpoint it's no longer the moment that was capture but a modified version. It's a thorny issue with grey areas.
"Burning" the edges [of the final print] to the extent it mimics the "deep black" of space, is in fact faithful to the scene. PJ's "Burn" the edges of news images everyday. That is, they "darken" the edges to create relative contast to the focal point they wish to show. This is not deemed unethical, but rather legitmatley "expressive". The terminology comes from film emulsion days, when the overexposre of the positive image to (unfiltered) light, would darkens the photosensive elemnts of the (white) paper. The fact that this was shot originally in MF film, makes me feel better about this, for some reason. The original negative would have been "clear" in this area.
