"Hey, do me a favor, wear this hoodie and go hand this plastic baggie with white powder in it to that guy over there, it's for an art project, he's going to act like he doesn't know you, and then you just run in the opposite direction to where you'll be payed"
Or "here's three photos of XYZ taken on three seperate days at his new favorite coffee shop, notably across from this elementary school. Read on for our take on why he likes this shop so much!"
Or even something as simple as positioning the camera just so that one national head appears shorter than another. Or, in an interview, adjusting lights on the 'hero' to make them look good and highlight the shadows on the 'villain' to make them look ominous.
Use a mirror set up to make it look to the 'villain' that they are making eye contact but are instead looking weirdly askance.
Limitations are the origin of creativity. Force publishing RAW would just force journalists to be more creative in their framing.
Also, no edits for filesize? Lossless RAWs are huge! Especially from professional cameras. You could end up loading a gig of data for a single article with 10 images, or even more for larger frames. The few who care enough to see the 'real' image (that is still tainted by photographer intent regardless of file size and editting) are motivated enough to click the lossy jpg for the raw. Those who do not care aren't going to sit waiting on the order of minutes to see the first image.
Or: the CCTV is well hidden, but the people who installed it left behind some mud that got on someone's shoes and that made them late...
what exactly is the 'threat model' that you're trying to protect against here? If you already don't trust John Doe as a credible source, of course then there's a million ways he can frame a scene to tell an unreliable story. That's always been the case.
But to me, what we're looking for now in the age of diffusion models is for someone to be able to say "here is the provenance of this image, it came from John Doe's camera" and that can survive being shared round the internet, provably.
> You could end up loading a gig of data for a single article with 10 images, or even more for larger frames.
I'm not suggesting that the _only_ thing that gets used is a raw image. I'm saying that if you go to the Wall Street Journal, then underneath the photo, beside the credit, they put a link out to some page that hosts the RAW file, the metadata of the camera used and a signature.
If you find the photo unbelievable and think it's bogus, you're able to regenerate the signature from the parts and see that it's valid. (and obviously if they link off to something that's massively different - that isn't just compression, white balance, etc - people hold them to account)
Provide the raw original, and the exact processing steps used to get the presentable one.
You cannot replace honesty with tech.