Hypothetical Jounalism

I recently saw an article on one of the many environmentalist web sites that offered up a very deceiving and misrepresenting photo with a banner headline about crops and crop land falling into a river somewhere in the Midwest. Upon closer inspection one stalk of corn can be seen in the river in this bird's eye view photo taken of a several mile stretch. The article continued on in the vain one would suspect, that of taking angry pot shots at farmers for supposed land mismanagement. Finally near the end of this nearly two page attack came the sentence that put the whole thing into perspective, "because the corn crop in this hypothetical example...", or in other words made up for the sake of argument. How many people read this kind of journalism and take it for the truth? Sadly, too many. In this day and age creating or altering an image in photoshop is as easy, and apparently as tempting to some, as pie. The denoting of all farmers as hypothetical "bad guys" in the afore mentioned article is as irresponsible and incorrigible as was the reporting by some on the H1N1 virus, which was mislabeled and misreported as the "swine flu".