Retouching photos for the newspaper has become a touchy issue in recent years. When I first started at the Deseret News in 1970, we touched up every photo. People were painted out of group photos. Women in iffy outfits were made more presentable. Liquor bottles were wiped away. Wrinkles and bad teeth were taken care of.

Our artists had more in common with plastic surgeons than Rembrandt.

Over the years, for my column picture, the artists have painted obnoxious patterns out of my clothes and — in one — they even gave me more hair.

No more.

Today everything has to be "warts and all."

More and more, people are demanding to know what is authentic and what isn't.

It's happening in all areas of society.

I remember when lip-synching during a concert was no big deal.

Today it's a scandal.

Nobody used to care much if a painter copied another painter's work.

Now they do.

For decades it never occurred to fruit juice companies to distinguish between "artificially flavored" and "made with real fruit juice."

Now they care.

But before you think this is one of those "Why can't today be more like yesterday?" columns, let me say I think the insistence on authenticity is not only proper, it's vital.

We live in an era when synthesizers can recreate the tones of a violin so accurately that concert masters can't tell the difference.

Hollywood, today, has the ability to create a new movie staring Marilyn Monroe, without Marilyn Monroe.

In fact, with deception and mimicry growing more sophisticated every day, the people's right to "truthfulness" from manufacturers, politicians and artists is gaining on Thomas Jefferson's famous rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Besides, those who say human beings — especially Americans — prefer "pleasant fictions" to truth are almost always people who are out to make a buck from those pleasant fictions.

As for newspapers and those shelves of touched-up photographs that we ran years ago, I have to wonder how many "pleasant fictions" have now been canonized as "documented history."

The old newspaper editor in the movie "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" said "When the legend becomes the truth, print the legend."

In other words, "Touch up those photos!"

Today, however, people don't care much for sugar-coating.

They want the "true truth."

They feel they have a right to it.

And they do.

e-mail: jerjohn@desnews.com