Here are some responses from forkliftaction.com's Safety First columnists:

Regarding the football-fantasy photograph, no trainer or safety person would ever endorse this type of action, but it happens thousands of times every day in the US with real workers, not actors or football players, involved in a photo shoot.
A person in the material handling industry may say "wow look at the Crown lifting that guy," but outside those circles it is just a forklift to most people. I think there is zero damage to Crown as we all know they would never approve of that type of thing even in a photo shoot if they knew about it.
Most non-forklift folks are uninformed, and many operators are trained so poorly that they might not even know what is wrong, which is a real tragedy in many ways.
I think spending too much time on something minor like this distracts away from the real issues that kill forklift operators and pedestrians every day around the world. How about a cover on the fact that in the US more people are killed by forklifts than by tornados or by poisonous snakes each year? Now that is a story worth printing and a problem worth fixing.
David Hoover
President
Forklift Training Systems