Photo fiddling has always been done. There's the old thing from Soviet Russia about replacing out-of-favor communists with blocks of wood. It's just that now it's so darn simple. When my grandfather died, there were no really good pictures of him available that didn't have clutter in the background, so one of my cousins took one of these, scanned it, and edited out the clutter - and, naturally, the edited regions were indistinguishable from the parts of the background that weren't cluttered (the background being a sort of mottled blue wall). Not only were they now absent, but you couldn't tell anything had ever been there in the first place. Which was pretty keen.
However, the sheer triviality of such things means that photographic and recorded evidence can never be totally trusted by anyone with enough functioning brain cells to wonder if it was fiddled with. And, by extension, when the photographic evidence is real, people may not necessarily believe that it isn't faked. For example, National Geographic got spanked a while back for fiddling with an image of the Great Pyramids to make it more magazine-cover-friendly. This sort of thing is fairly common, apparently, although not with the Geographic in particular (they quickly cottoned that this was naughty), and now their photographers often lament that what with people fiddling with images of animals to snazz them up, when they do get a good shot, it's not a given that people won't look at it and go "Oooh, nice Photoshop work".
Another example is from my High School days, when the school's underground newspaper got its hands on the real school paper's photography file, including the inevitable embarassing fiddling-about-with-the-camera shots, acting wacky in front of the lens, et cetera. One of these wound up on the underground newspaper's cover, and started an uproar about how they'd "edited images of the students" despite the fact that the people in the photograph as well as the person who took the picture, none of whom had anything to do with the paper, all admitted that it was real.
People are wacky that way.
And now, of course, computers have sufficient beef to modify broadcast images in real time. This is cool when it's inserting the leetle yellow line onto the field of a football game, so you can keep track of things more easily.
It's not so cool when you go around removing competitors' ads from the background, possibly replacing them with your own, or just plain mucking about. It's not so much the principle of alteration in general, it's the fact that the people watching don't know you're doing it. The glowing line (or puck) is blatantly obvious. Replacing that Visa ad billboard that's inconveniently behind your reporter with something from one of your sponsors is another matter entirely.
Once the principle gets established, what next? Adding squalor to urban shots when you're doing an urban interest story? Editing out those inconvenient homeless types shambling about in the background when you're doing a business story? Drawing a moustache on that inevitable moron who hangs out right behind the newscaster when there's a crowd scene, making faces and grinning like an idiot?
After all, there's no law against it, and that makes it O.K.
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