That reference took me five goddam minutes to find. I had the photographer's name, and the year, and the rest was just a short search to find who he was and where the research happened. Any idiot writing the story or curious about it could have done it if they had cared about accurate representation. I would be greatly interested to know who first dug up the three-year-old shot and stuck it on the wire services.

If I take a closeup picture of a kid at Disney World who's crying because his ice cream fell on the street, and stick it with no further information on top of an article about war orphans, is that journalism? Or propaganda?

Did you think those bears were in trouble when you first saw the shot? That they were stuck up there? How many people do you think did, given no more information? How many other people, like me, would actually wonder how damn long a stranded polar bear would have to sit on a berg to have it melt out from under her like that? Rather than just having hoisted out of the water and climbing up on an old half-melted berg to look for seals swimming?

Did the other dispatches on the huge amounts of ice in the summer make any impression? Should they?

I expect that the photo rights are legal enough. I seriously doubt the pictures were stolen. The press is pretty careful about that. Of course, the photographer doesn't always control the captions.

You think this is the only example of this sort of thing? You should have seen what's been done with war photography.