You seem to have missed the point - that was not a photo. If he were responding to an article that called this a photo, he was right. If the objects of his ire had wanted to be taken seriously, they ought to have supplied an actual citation (or at least a proper, working link to the actual source).
It makes sense that organizations like that would have different levels of publication for these sorts of things depending on the sort of peer review they get. Those particular articles may not have any peer-review at all, so it makes sense NASA would have the disclaimer.
Where I work we have multiple levels of publication depending on how much peer-review a product gets. I just wrote an internal paper that had two reviewers (one from in my own division and one from another division). It's a minor paper. For a complete study they might have had a dozen reviewers at each major phase of the project. If something is not reviewed, that is clearly stated and it's noted that's it's not an official publication.
I think it would be a bizarre and debilitated scientific environment in which scientists could not communicate unless they had peer review.
