The New York Post is my guilty pleasure. But after yesterday’s disturbing cover photo I may have to rethink my allegiance to their special brand of tabloid journalism.
The paper has drawn loads of criticism for publishing the photo of a man who was pushed off a subway platform by a mumbling man, as the train that is about to kill him bears down on him. The obvious question is why didn’t the photographer help? He says he did – that he set off his photo flash repeatedly to try to warn the subway driver that the man was on the tracks. So he just kept snapping and snapping until he got the morbid money shot.
Was this necessary? In a world where newspapers are becoming increasingly irrelevant, is it simply a cry for attention?
As I write this, police believe they may have found the person who shoved the Queens Dad to his death. The 58-year-old was disoriented from the fall and couldn’t get up in time to escape the train.
I believe in telling the truth but there have been a couple of examples of invading privacy disguised as truth this week in the media. The first was the London Free Press describing in detail the horrifying moments when the parents of an 11-year-old girl, struck by a train, found out that their daughter had been hit. (She died later that night.) The second was this one.
In me, it inspired only helplessness. Does it do any good for anyone to see that photo? For me, like the witness accounts of a Mother’s agony over her daughter’s lifeless body, I don’t leave the page better informed. I leaving wishing I’d never read it.
UPDATE: New York Police have charged the man with one count of second degree attempted murder and one count of second degree murder with grave indifference. They say the suspect implicated himself during their interview with him. Meanwhile the photographer who took the cover photo is taking more heat than the editor of the Post, who should be held accountable. There were people closer to the victim than the photographer, who was running the entire time he clicked his camera. Things are not always as they seem.