The primary objective of virtually all news agencies is simple: get as many viewers to look at their sponsor's ads as possible. That is how they pay the bills.
They must find a balance between sensationalism and public trust. They have to appear trustworthy to get viewers, but at the same time, portray events in a way that maximizes viewer interest. The two methods don't play nicely with each other.
There's been a lot of photoshop jobs in the news lately -- it's an epidemic of sorts, and the public outcry has been forcing the media to adopt very strict standards of acceptable image manipulation. Manipulating news images isn't a new phenomena however, photoshop has just made it a little bit easier to accomplish, and it has become public knowledge.
The general standard is that you cannot add, remove, or obscure any information from a news image via any tool -- most notably the clone/healing tool, but also global and localized contrast adjustments, jokingly called 'hand of God' techniques.
My opinion on the matter as a photographer goes against the grain however. I feel that any photographer who wants to deceive the public never had to resort to photoshop to begin with. Images tell a visual story, and a photographer can easily manipulate that story simply by what parts he chooses to include or exclude. An honest photographer can use photoshop to enhance a photo to better tell the story as it happened, whereas a dishonest photographer uses it to convey a different story than what happened, so it makes no sense to me to have black-and-white rules about which tools are allowed to be used on an image.
I also feel most of the problem is that people have unrealistic assumptions about photography. They assume the visual content of a photo is real, when really, the photographer has full control over the content, perspective, style, etc. It's about as real as shadow puppets -- a fancy optical illusion.
The only thing I don't understand is how some of these photoshop jobs get past the photo editor! Most of them I've seen (including the ones linked in the OP), have very obviously been manipulated, to the point where average people can even tell. Even if they are manipulated on purpose, news agencies are required to caption any manipulated photo as a "photo illustration" to avoid confusion with real events.
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