Is It
Wrong for a Newspaper to Publish a Front-Page Photo of a Man About to Die?
By The New York Times
A New York City tabloid
newspaper caused a stir this week by publishing a front-page photograph of a
man trapped on a subway platform seconds before he was killed by an oncoming
train. The victim, Ki-Suck Han, was pushed onto the tracks by another man on
the platform. The New York Post’s choice of a front-page photo led to an
intense reaction in the public and the news media.
If you were the editor of The
Post, would you have published the photograph? Why do you think this picture
has caused such a stir?
In “Train Wreck: The New York Post’s Subway Cover”, the Times columnist David Carr writes about the photograph and the response to the photograph:
“It all happened so fast.”
That’s what R. Umar Abbasi, a
freelance photographer for The New York Post, said of the fatal subway incident
on Monday that he caught with his camera. One man threw another into harm’s
way, causing him to be run over by an oncoming train. This last part happened
in the blink of a shutter.
But the decision to put the
image on the The Post’s cover and frame it with a lurid headline that said
“this man is about to die”? That part didn’t happen quickly. The treatment of
the photo was driven by a moral and commercial calculus that was sickening to
behold. (If the image is not already burned into your skull, it can be found
all over the Web, including in The New York Times’s City Room blog. Tut-tutting
about a salacious photo here while enjoying the benefits of its replication
seems inappropriate.)
And it’s not just the media
commentators who are weighing in. Twitter crackled with invective and
recriminations. Every once in a while a journalism ethics question actually
engages the public, and so it was with the brutally documented death of Ki-Suck
Han, 58, of Elmhurst, Queens….
If you
were the editor of The Post, would you have published the photograph on the
front page?