Talk about what might happen. Raise the possibility without demanding to see it. Instead, expect to see something better. Encourage good photographers to work for themselves, for posterity, for their grandchildrennot just for you. A photograph that solves a magazine's problem is more interesting when the solution is something you remember after the problem is forgotten.
Text editors do their work after the fact.
No photographer can go out today and take a photograph that sums up the Bush Administration. Photographs don't generalize. But a detail, when photographed, often conveys a sense of a whole. A finger, the man. A leaf, the tree.