It seems that Adobe is in the line of fire a lot lately. One of the features of the new Photoshop CS5 is "content-aware fill," an ability that makes it even easier than before to remove, replace, or modify things in an image. Already commentary about how that is good or bad for photography has started brewing.
But I'm pretty much on Adobe's side on this one. If you're using Photoshop, you're modifying things. So having another tool to modify with is just that, another tool. I say welcome.
The downside is that a number of issues we already have in the photography business are just going to get worse. Intentional copying of images is already rampant, and the ability to remove and combine elements leads to "new images" that have a less defined Copyright status. But this isn't a Photoshop problem, it's a societal one.
As for reality in photo journalism (pictures accompanying news articles): maybe the publications ought to look into Nikon Image Authentication. It is possible to verify that an image you receive hasn't been modified from the one taken by the camera, after all. I know if I were a working PJ these days I'd be using image verification.