Just check out the quality of editorial contents that is being used on one of Germany's most popular news websites. The sensor spots are a disgrace for any professional photographer. Unbelievable. It's not that the motive is in the middle of a desert with dust unavoidable - its NY with the ability to buy any sensor cleaning solution a couple of blocks away.

http://www.spiegel.de/schulspiegel/ausland/0,1518,grossbild-1576899-641142,00.html

The photographer should submit to microstock.  They'd teach him a thing or two!!

This may be a bit harsh , but if you look at many of the editorials on the www.,
you see frightful copy of news reports, almost everywhere, and every single day... even on yahoo news.
I shake my head every time I see silly mistakes that even my 5 year old nephew would be able to pick out. Tells me that most of these "journalists" did not master the language even in their primary school, never mind pass Journalism.
They also rely so heavily on their spelling checker rather than their brains, which is highly evident when you see words like "loose" instead of "lose", "fare" instead of "fair", "herd" instead of "horde",etc... just to mention a few.
This  reflects unfavourably on the editors as they are the ones who should have caught those silly errors before going to press. Thus, when someone presents me something in photograph like you have here, it does not surprise me at all.

That being said, micro stock, on the other hand, has raised the bar perharps to a height that does not reflect the amount of money a photograph is worth.
What is the point of showing the media world how high your standard is with micro, when you progressively continue to undercut the earning of your contributors?  It is absurd just thinking about this.

If you set the standards so high, surely any logical person will expect the buyers to willingly pay for such high standards.
Failing that,  it would be like announcing to the world that a Ferrari which must possess extreme quality, and pass stringent QA test to make it the best working luxury automobile, should only be expected to sell at the lowest price possible...
something much like the price of a Volkswagen or worst a second hand bone shaker. Which is the perfect analogy of where we are now with our "high quality images" being sold at subscription rates.

Yes, there is something very wrong in the media standard to allow such an oversight. But, there is also something equally wrong for micro stock to allow
something just as equally obnoxious as to keep underpaying their contributors
for "such high quality" images.

There is something wrong with this picture, no pun intended.

There are many newspapers and magazines that use very poor quality images, sometimes I am amazed at this.  It's not an excuse, though, but does this agency have reviewers?

 If your agency has no reviewer, there is still a photo editor.
Even a high school newspaper or a two bit weekly tabloid has an editor and a photo editor. The editor inspects and approves copy, while the photo ed inspects and approves photos for press. In a shoestring op,  the owner would do all this.