I've never seen that photograph before, I don't do as much reading in the global warming agitprop press as you appear to do, although I don't doubt it's been widely circulated. It's a striking image, and would probably have survived and used for other stories even if nobody had ever heard of global warming. It is, after all, your basic bears doing their normal bear thing, as you point out.

I'm no polar bear expert, but I do know they can swim very large stretches of open water, although they can't catch seals unless they ambush them on the ice, which is why they need ice to live. If I had seen that picture without any of this excess baggage running around, I would just think somebody took a picture of bears on the ice in summer, (from the shape of the ice and the shadows) there is no evidence of global warming or lack of it in that photo and no indication the beasts are stressed. There's no way of knowing if that picture was taken of the last floating ice for 500 miles or if it was shot from shore 500 feet away. It has no information content, it is simply an image.

If that picture had been captioned as dying bears starving to death on the last scrap of ice for hundreds of miles, then your charges might have some merit, but even then it is more likely to be the result of an overzealous or lazy editor than a deliberate attempt to lie. After all, the stories do not demand photographic evidence. But as long as it is just an illustration, it is no different than if an artist's sketch of a similar scene had been substituted for it. If there is a crime, it is the possible theft of the photographer's work (if that is indeed what happened, you might want to see if all your suspect articles credit her/his bylines).

All magazines do this sort of thing, on all different types of stories, it's just the nature of the business. I've had stories of mine illustrated by uncredited stock images which I have no idea where they came from, only that they are appropriate and in the public domain. In one case, they were even sepiad to make them look ancient to fit the nostalgic theme I was writing about. I wrote one article about two dolphins jumping out of the water by my boat, and the magazine found a stock picture of two dolphins jumping out of the water. It might even have misled someone into thinking I had photographed the event I was writing about.

There is no story here, Tom.