Decontextualizing for effect

Jon passed along a link to an examination of a news image. It occurred to me, having looked at the images, that this sort of thing has been honed to a fine art over the last decade or so of editorialized news reporting. Not that it didn't happen before, but that it's no longer in any way remarkable for images to be used to advance an agenda in a stealthy manner. That this is accepted practice in reporting is a bad thing for the media, in that it inevitably undermines the "objective reporting" concept to the point of farce.