A photo editor would get similar flack for using a photo where the subject was blinking. It doesn’t matter that the photo is physically “true”. In the context of a news story, it can be deeply misleading.
And it would be especially so, if it was captioned to make the reader believe the subject was asleep.
(I don’t think this has anything to do with eye-mouths, which clearly are only ever intended to reveal the subject’s true likeness, not obscure it.)
