[ChrisHardie]

Articles should not have images that are misleading or confusing, but I do understand why most news articles have something when it comes to imagery. Most news website designs are optimized for at least one image per article, and social media sharing almost requires it if you expect any kind of engagement at all. But it’s not a problem the media world should have to solve at the expense of the reader experience. (Disclosure: I’m a journalist and digital editor who spends way more time than I’d like trying to pick the least harmful stock or file image in the cases where we just don’t have a good image for a story.)

[pooper]

Maybe a practical compromise is to use whatever image you can find but actually explain in the caption that sausage making process in what the image is and why it was chosen. For example, recently on YouTube a video had footage of go carts but they used an F1 analogy and explained that F1 footage is hard to come by and expensive.