The Sept. 14th Newsweek cover line — “Is Your Baby Racist?” — should have included a sub-head, “Is Dick Cheney a Butcher?”

Featured inside the magazine was a full-page, stand-alone picture of former Vice President Dick Cheney, knife in hand, leaning over a bloody carving board. Newsweek used it to illustrate a quote that he made about C.I.A. interrogators. By linking that photo with Mr. Cheney’s comment and giving it such prominence, they implied something sinister, macabre, or even evil was going on there.

I took that photograph at his daughter Liz’s home during a two-day assignment, and was shocked by its usage. The meat on the cutting board wasn’t the only thing butchered. In fact, Newsweek chose to crop out two-thirds of the original photograph, which showed Mrs. Cheney, both of their daughters, and one of their grandchildren, who were also in the kitchen, getting ready for a simple family dinner.

However, Newsweek’s objective in running the cropped version was to illustrate its editorial point of view, which could only have been done by shifting the content of the image so that readers just saw what the editors wanted them to see. This radical alteration is photo fakery. Newsweek’s choice to run my picture as a political cartoon not only embarrassed and humiliated me and ridiculed the subject of the picture, but it ultimately denigrated my profession.

Kennerly says this is an example of why people don’t believe what they see or read. He cites a Pew poll [with a generic rather than direct link] finding that nearly two-thirds of Americans says they believe “the media gets it wrong and is biased — 25 years ago, the number was half that.”

I find that a self-important stretch.

We photojournalists have a long and storied tradition of striving for objectivity. Many of my colleagues have died flying that banner. I consider myself as much historian as photographer, having spent a 40-year career endeavoring to make photographs that inform, not misinform.

That’s all well and good, but I don’t see the cropping of a photo as much different than the routine editing of a news story (something traditional journalists say we bloggers sorely need). An editor cutting a story for space, or rewriting for clarity or emphasis; a headline writer grabbing attention for the story, all have their analogues in modern digital photography techniques.

We can alter lighting, color, and focus for emphasis and/or impact. And while the photographer composes a shot, cropping is the most basic of photo manipulation processes. Once, I was a photo-purist too. Working with students I’ve learned that digital techniques are their own art form, a language, as legitimate as photography itself. And integral to it.

Finally, in this specific instance, I don’t see the dark editorial perspective Kennerly finds in the published image. Rather, in the language of Kennerly’s complaint, I see the same grandiose sensationalism that is responsible for tarnishing traditional journalism in my eyes.

This is Newsweek’s response:

We doubt any reasonable reader would, in David’s phrase, think something “sinister, macabre, or even evil” was going on in that image as presented. Yes, the picture has been cropped, an accepted practice of photographers, editors and designers since the invention of the medium. We cropped the photograph using editorial judgment to show the most interesting part of it. Is it a picture of the former vice president cutting meat? Yes, it is. Has it been altered? No. Did we use the image to make an editorial point — in this case, about the former vice president’s red-blooded, steak-eating, full-throated defense of his views and values? Yes, we did.