Grisly tabloid photo captures our inhumanity

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 10:47:00 +0000

To publish or not to publish? That was the debate in media circles this week after the New York Post printed a horrifying photo of a man named Ki Suk Han who had been pushed onto the subway tracks and was trying to avoid getting hit by a train. In its typical bombastic fashion, Rupert Murdoch's tabloid offered up the image as cheap, decontextualized news pornography for infotainment junkies. "Doomed" blared the headline in giant type, with the macabre subhead telling readers "this man is about to die."

The Post's singular goal, of course, was to attract eyeballs. To do that, the paper's editors opted to tap into the same impulse that prompts drivers to gawk at grisly highway accidents. In response, critics, like my Salon colleague Mary Elizabeth Williams, excoriated the paper for engaging in a "shamelessly tasteless stunt" that was all about exploitation.

"This wasn’t like the historic front page stories of the My Lai massacre, or of crowds lynching men in the South, or of Kent State: photographs of dead bodies that arrived with a demand for action and justice," Williams wrote, summing up the pervasive criticism. "They were pictures that told a bigger story about a major news event ... What does the Post have to say, aside from the fact that an apparently disturbed man pushed a commuter toward his death?"

The New York Post defends its indefensible photo

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:25:00 +0000

On Monday, 58-year-old Ki Suk Han was pushed off the platform at the 49thStreet subway station, and struck and killed by a southbound Q train. Don't you feel just terrible for the photographer who was there to turn the grisly crime into a cover story for the New York Post? This whole thing has been really harrowing. For him.

On Tuesday, the eternally tasteless Murdoch tabloid plumbed a new depth by running a cover image of Ki Suk Han helplessly clutching the edge of the platform from the tracks, his head turned in the direction of the oncoming car, with the headline, "DOOMED: Pushed on the Subway Track, This Man Is About to Die." Since then, both the image and the ethics of running it have been debated widely in other news outlets and on Twitter. In the New York Times, David Carr aptly condemned the horror of the image of "someone who is doomed, but still among us," saying the Post "milked the death of someone for maximum commercial effect … He ended up run over twice."

Salon.com > Ki Suk Han

Grisly tabloid photo captures our inhumanity

The New York Post defends its indefensible photo