I still don't think it is right. Look at the areas of lightness. Why fake lightness, unless it is a mushroom shape he was going for?I don't know what you mean by "areas of lightness," and it's not easy to do any sophisticated photo analysis on a low-resolution, heavily compressed version of the image from Yahoo. If there were any shenanigans on the refed photo, it's subtle enough that it would take a higher-res, less-compressed version to nail down.
Sorry, but I still don't see the argument for bias or the motive here. Why risk your job to make a cloud of smoke look vaguely more mushroom shaped? I don't doubt the widespread existence of bias in the media (several different biases, actually), but some of the arguments are reminiscent of the folks looking for skull-shapes in the ice cubes in liquor ads.
Placing the two photos side-by-side, I believe most people would agree that the the fraudulent photograph is more lurid and provocative. If they were sounds, the second photo would be a few decibels louder.
Common sense says the person who doctored the photo was trying to make a political statement through selective amplification.
In my opinion, whoever doctored the image was clearly trying to make it look worse than it was, for whatever reason.
I disagree with people who imply that that the person was trying to do something artistic with the smoke, like insert some kind of shape, the visage of Jesus or whatever.
Digital manipulation of photos to be used in news media is a tricky business, how much are you allowed to alter legitimately using functions such as curves, color/saturation adjustment and such, and where do you draw the line?
Even legitimate functions such as unsharp mask can be used inappropriately for a biased agenda, if used in specific ways. Take for example, this well known case of USA Today and their manipulation of photos of Condi Rice:
In this case, USA Today apparently selected her eyes only and used high levels of unsharp mask to exaggerate them.
Was this demonic appearance an undesired result by USA Today? Not likely.
But I agree with you. I don't think this rank amateur at Reuters was trying to insert a subliminal message. They just wanted to make the Israeli "Boot on the neck of innocent Lebanon" appear much worse than it is.