Salon.com > New York Post

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?"

Man charged for deadly subway push

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 20:59:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) -- A homeless man was arrested Wednesday in the death of a subway rider who was pushed onto the tracks and photographed just before a train struck him.

Naeem Davis, 30, was taken into custody for questioning Tuesday after security video showed a man fitting the suspect's description working with street vendors near Rockefeller Center. Police said Davis made statements implicating himself in Ki-Suck Han's death.

Davis was arrested on a second-degree murder charge. He was in custody, and it wasn't immediately clear if he had a lawyer. It also wasn't clear when he would appear in court. He has several prior arrests in New York and Pennsylvania on mostly minor charges including drug possession.

Witnesses told investigators they saw a man talking to himself Monday afternoon before he approached the 58-year-old Han of Queens at the Times Square station, got into an altercation with him and pushed him into the train's path.

The New York Post published a photo on its front page Tuesday of Han with his head turned toward the train, his arms reaching up but unable to climb off the tracks in time. It was shot by freelance photographer R. Umar Abbasi, who was waiting to catch a train.

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."

Alec Baldwin versus the New York Post

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 16:40:00 +0000

It's like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of blowhardiness: two great, dependably outraged forces in one overwrought, excited (and inevitably deleted) Twitter rant. Oh, Alec Baldwin, you're like Trump with better politics and hair. Don't ever change! And who was the object of his Irish temper? Why, none other than New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser, a woman whose charm and compassion can be summed up by the fact New York Magazine describes her as "Madame Defarge."

It's an emotional time for Baldwin, with "30 Rock" now careening toward its ending and a strange stalker case hanging over his head. But that didn't stop Peyser this week from banging out a unique defense of Baldwin's alleged stalker, Genevieve Sabourin. Sabourin, who is accused of sending harassing emails and showing up uninvited at Baldwin's homes, was arrested recently for allegedly violating an order of protection issued last spring. (She was released soon after.) But in Peyser's version of events, "Alec toyed with Genevieve’s womanly affections, treating her to a one-night stand like some kind of cheap whore. Now she wants to expose him for what he is: a cad … Hey, Alec, she says you slept with her! Deal with it, creep."

Demonizing looters puts property above people

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 23:30:00 +0000

In the chaotic and deadly days that followed Hurricane Katrina, orders that circulated through the New Orleans Police Department sent a chilling message: Private property would be prioritized over human life. "Shoot looters," "Take back the city," "Do what you have to do," were the mandates that led to the deaths of 11 civilians, according to an extensive ProPublica report.

According to the investigation, it remains unclear where the order first originated, but according to ProPublica, "current and former officers said the police orders – taken together with tough talk from top public officials broadcast over the airwaves -- contributed to an atmosphere of confusion about how much force could be used to combat looting."

Seven years later, another devastating hurricane has torn through the U.S., leaving tens of thousands homeless and many more in desperate need of food and basic supplies. "We can't get a bottle of water," a man from New York's battered Rockaway Peninsula shouted at Mayor Michael Bloomberg as the mayor surveyed the wreckage. But after a few scattered reports, the specter of the demon looter has reemerged as fodder for firebrand pundits.

Ahmadinejad’s evil covers

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 17:15:00 +0000

The media has enjoyed mocking Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for years for the plethora of bigoted, homophobic and anti-Israel statements he continues to make. In light of his most recent offenses, here's a collection of the most spirited Ahmadinejad magazine and newspaper covers.

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16. Andrea Peyser

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:00:00 +0000

If you haven't spent much time reading the papers in New York City, you may not be familiar with Andrea Peyser. But you may have noticed the woman in the first row of Anthony Weiner's carnivalesque meltdown of a June press conference announcing his online flirtations who spent an inordinate amount of time shouting uncomfortable questions to the soon-to-be-former congressman about the whereabouts of his wife. That's Peyser. She needed the material so that she could finish her 10th column about how Weiner is history's second greatest monster, next to Eliot Spitzer.

Peyser is the New York Post's resident joyless puritanical scold with a particularly Murdochian obsession with sex. Week in and week out, her column -- which has expanded to become an entire page in the physical paper -- details precisely which women are hookers, sluts, gold diggers and tramps (hint: most women, besides some wronged wives) and which men are whore-mongers and perverts (every Democratic politician alive).