"But the Big Story ..."

My newsroom is in an abolute tizzy right now over the "cloned soldiers" revelation. It seems the Bush campaign, in the course of making a TV ad, wanted a generic shot of a crowd of soldiers, to serve as the background for a chunk of text. So they fond a shot of Bush speaking, with soldiers ranked behind him, they plucked out Bush and the podium, and they cloned some of the soldiers to cover the hole. Daily Kos or one of those sites discovered this, and posted it up. The big media jumped on it at once. There are now two photos and two graphics on the wire as well as a full story.

What's the big deal? It would be unethical as journalism, but this is a frigging campaign ad. Advertisers do such things all the time. It's not like Bush himself made this decision. And they took their candidate out of the picture. It's not a Zelig event. But now we're talking about tearing out the back page of tomorrow's newspaper, and re-plating it to get this "story" in prominently.