Right, Larry Downing/Reuters

It was the ideal metaphor for a politically troubled president.

There was President Obama on the cover of the June 19 issue of The Economist, standing alone on a Louisiana beach, head down, looking forlornly at the ground.

The problem was, he was not actually alone. The photograph was just edited to make it look that way.

The unaltered image, shot on May 28 by a Reuters photographer, Larry Downing, shows Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard and Charlotte Randolph, a local parish president, standing alongside the president. But in the image that appeared on The Economist’s cover, Admiral Allen and Ms. Randolph had been scrubbed out, replaced by the blue water of the Gulf of Mexico.

When it comes to its own photographers, Reuters has stringent standards regarding photo editing. “Reuters has a strict policy against modifying, removing, adding to or altering any of its photographs without first obtaining the permission of Reuters and, where necessary, the third parties referred to,” Thomson Reuters said in a statement on Sunday.

Editors from The Economist had no comment when asked on Friday about the cover image.

Reuters had a photo-editing controversy of its own in 2006 after one of its freelance photographers altered images of the Israeli military incursion into Lebanon to make the damage from Israeli warplanes appear more severe. Reuters later stopped working with the photographer and removed his images from its photo archives.

Emma Duncan, deputy editor of The Economist, told us this about the cover in an e-mail message on Monday: