A 90's issue of the TV Guide had a cover (Oprah! The Richest Woman On TV?) which superimposed the talk show host's face on the body of Ann-Margret. The photo WAS NOT IDENTIFIED AS A COMPOSITE, and TV Guide acknowledged that unsuspecting readers would think it a real photograph.
David Sendler, TV Guide national section editor: "Ann-Margret should be thrilled because she's got another TV Guide cover. And Oprah should be thrilled because she looks terrific."

 A bizarre, isolated misfiring by an overzealous artist? Hardly. Digital computer technology is enabling the industry to alter photos to an unreal degree, undetectable by the public.  
  National Geographic once used a computer to move one of the Great Pyramids of Giza so it would fit better on the cover.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch removed a can of Diet Coke from a photo of Ron Olshwanger, a free-lance photographer who had just won the paper a Pulitzer Prize for photography.
The Orange County Register changed the color of the sky in an AP photo of the Challenger disaster from dark and gloomy to bright blue. The paper has also been accused of filtering out smog in its photos (!).

 Photographs aren't the only media being altered.  A freelance photographer, Mike Hoover, has been accused of faking and restaging Afghanistan battle sequences for a 1987 CBS News documentary, "The Battle For Afghanistan", which won numerous awards. CBS has maintained silence over the incident, which tends to lend the charges resonance.

 In a Sept. 5, 1989 televised address on drug strategy from the Oval Office, President Bush held up a clear plastic bag labeled "evidence", and said it was crack that had been seized in a park across the street from the White House. In actuality, members of his Administration had lured a drug dealer to the park and bought the crack for $2,400. The dealer was not arrested.

An ABC News report used two staged images to show how U.S. diplomat Felix S. Bloch was alleged to have handed a briefcase to a Soviet agent. Bloch had not been charged with any wrongdoing, but was being investigated by the FBI on suspicion of spying.  
 Peter Jennings, an ABC anchorman, apologized in a subsequent newscast for the network's FAILURE TO IDENTIFY THE SEGMENT AS A SIMULATION.
 Sam Donaldson, an ABC correspondent: "The unidentified simulation could have led viewers to believe that they had actually seen the event. And they might say, 'Well, I saw the dirty sonofabitch pass the briefcase to a dirty Commie spy...' Well, no, they didn't. They didn't see that at all."
Fred Friendly, a former CBS News president: "This fooled everybody. A friend of mine (a top editor of a major metropolitan newspaper) looked at it and said he had no idea it was a simulation."
Lawrence Grossman, former NBC News president: "I think it's very dangerous. I think it was particulary unfortunate that they tried to fake the look of an FBI surveillance film. News divisions should not be in the business of creating fiction, or fiction from fact. These techniques are beginning to overwhelm the old standards. When you start mucking up reality, even though it may be justified in a particular instance, it really creates a very dangerous pattern."

A public that has grown comfortable, uncaring and/or totally unable to distinguish lines separating reality from fiction, combined with a re- emergence of governmental "McCarthy" witch-hunts, and these simulation/alteration techniques, could make the pogroms of Hitler's Nazi regime seem like the pranks of a Boy Scout troop.

 Why wait for an "emergency" to invoke "police-state"-type powers when you can create one, thus guaranteeing a greater degree of control?

Donald Goldberg, in an article for Omni magazine ["The National Guards"], concluded that efforts to restrict information "can be reduced to the rationale that the country's enemies have to be prevented from access to unclassified sources, and the only way to do that is to take control of the sources." Goldberg fears that, left unchecked, the military may eventually gain complete control of what we see, hear and read.

 In June 1987, a Federal advisory committee endorsed a major expansion of a national computer file which is managed by the FBI, that would permit Federal, state and local agencies to exchange information on people who are suspected of a crime but have not been charged.
One of the most significant changes envisioned by the FBI is to "give law-enforcement officers a new capacity to track the movement of a person under investigation for whom no arrest warrant has been issued." You read that correctly.

 Parallel it with a case filed by the ACLU in Brandon, Vermont (May '87), in behalf of a newspaper editor claiming intimidation of the press by the local police dept. After publishing two letters to the editor which were critical of the P.D., Woody L. Hunter, editor and publisher of the weekly Review, had a large file compiled on him by the Brandon Police Dept. which included background checks to his hometown and license checks on visitors to his newspaper office.

Rogue police and government agencies working in tandem with such a national computer system could very rapidly undermine our present concepts of freedom of movement, freedom of the press and public response to malfesance.

 M. Scott Peck, author of 'The Road Less Traveled', and 'People of the Lie', considers such government malfesance evil. He defines evil as a "real spirit of unreality", and believes that the "government to a considerable extent is pervaded and operates by such a spirit...it is descending into evil."