Microsoft apologized this week for digitally altering a photo on its web site to replace a black man with a white man.

An item on CNET News explains:

In a photo on the company’s U.S. Web site, three businesspeople — one black, one white and one Asian are shown as part of a pitch for Microsoft’s business productivity software. In the same photo on the site of Microsoft’s Polish subsidiary, a white head is placed over the black person’s body, although the hand is not changed.

That news came just days after the New York Times published an article in its Sunday Week in Review section that says photo manipulation has a long — if sordid — history.  From that article:

… the tampering began almost immediately: affixing Lincoln’s head to another politician’s more regally posed body; rearranging the grim detritus of Civil War battlefields to be better composed for the camera; erasing political enemies.

The Microsoft flap prompted ABC News to recall “10 Photo-Editing Flubs: Digitally Altered Photo Disasters.” ABC’s article states:

In advertising, there are no ethical restrictions when it comes to digital manipulation. But when those manipulations draw attention to race, the brand could find itself in trouble.

But in journalism, there are strong ethical restrictions, the article notes. One of ABC’s examples involves a doctored photo of an Israeli air raid in Beirut. Reuters fired the photographer.

For years, artists at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch airbrushed photos to highlight objects, often surrounding the object with white ink. (That practice stopped several decades ago.)

The Post-Dispatch is responsible for one of photojournalism’s infamous manipulations: The removal of a diet coke can from a photo in 1989.

Amateur photographer Ron Olshwanger had just won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot-News Photography for a fire-rescue scene. The Post-Dispatch published that freelance photo on Page One.  The subsequent story about his Pulitzer Prize also appeared on Page One, with a photo of him in the Post-Dispatch newsroom. A Diet Coke can on a table beside him was digitally removed before it appeared in print.

The journalism ethics flap that resulted led to strong new policies at the paper about photo manipulation: It was banned.  Larry Coyne, now director of photography at the newspaper, says such an offense would prompt immediate dismissal today.