All three of your examples concern people with a vested interest in arriving at a certain conclusion established long before they ever actually look at the text

All three of your examples concern people with a vested interest in arriving at a certain conclusion established long before they ever actually look at the text in question. No communication medium will solve the problem of humans trying to bend that communication to fit their pre-existing opinions. For neutral observers, I would definitely argue that text is far more concrete than photos. There's a whole host of reasons for this in my opinion, but one that hasn't been mentioned in this thread is that humans are used to seeing images in three dimensions, whereas photos are typically two-dimensional. By removing an entire axis of data you're introducing far more room for ambiguity than could have existed previously.