Several years ago "Wired" magazine did a story on the dangers of digital pictures being used for news reports. They pointed out that a good manipulation of the picture would be near to impossible to detect and that digital photos were totally unreliable at that point. They even made the case for making pictures to fit the news. Seems they were right and that is just what is starting to happen. Luckily these cases are poorly done but how many are very well done and undetected. Their idea was that only actual film photos should be used for news reporting so authenticity could be verified.
The Russians regularly airbrushed photos for years. Going digital just made it easier.
Unfortunately raw film has had the same problem for at least 15 years. Hollywood has been using film printers in special affects at least since 1991. Basically what the film printer does is print digital images onto any film type. At least for the last 15 years it has been just about impossible (except for perhaps a tiny few hard cores) to tell if an old fashioned SLR or a film printer took the image.
A possible solution is to download the original chip to the newspaper and mark the photos to be used.
Doesn't stop deliberate distortion by the paper, but would stop rogue photojournalists.