Subway tragedy photo obscene, but so was inaction by bystanders - Arizona Daily Sun

The talk in newsrooms this past week has been about the New York Post photo of the man desperately trying to climb back up on a subway platform to avoid an oncoming train.

Just to make sure no reader missed the point, the Post superimposed the headline "DOOMED" across the full-cover photo.

Publishing the photo was tasteless to the point of being obscene. It took a man's last moments on Earth and commodified them for the titillation of strangers. As New York Times media critic David Carr succinctly put it, the victim was run over twice.

And so, unfortunately, have photojournalists and the news business generally. It's bad enough that most of the TV newscasts in major cities follow the dictum: "If it bleeds, it leads." For a print newspaper, even one owned by Rupert Murdoch, to descend to the same level and lower is an embarrassment to the trade.

Had the photographer not been clicking his shutter, the debate almost certainly would have focused more properly on why no one else on the platform even attempted to come to the man's aid. At least the photographer, a freelancer, ran toward the train, firing his flash to get the motorman's attention. He said he captured the horrifying image by chance (although it wasn't chance that led him straight to the offices of the New York Post).

It's easy for us in Flagstaff, 2,500 miles away from the menacing New York subway system, to second-guess bystanders and photojournalists. Daily Sun journalists and photographers understand that they are citizens first when it comes to obeying the law and protecting others from harm. But in reality, it is rare for a newsperson to be the first to a situation so desperate that he or she must lay down the notebook or the camera and rush into a burning building or talk a suicidal subject down from a ledge. That's what trained first responders do, and in the vast majority of cases, we in the news business cede the field to the experts, no matter how much, personally, we would like to help.

But that doesn't mean every photo we take or quote we gather at such incidents has to get into the newspaper. The Daily Sun has a policy of only proceeding with coverage after contacting the family or at least close friends and coworkers to get a feel for how sensitive they will be to a story.

That is why our coverage of such deaths usually appears several days later -- feelings are simply too raw in a close-knit community for an instant post to the web.

Yet that is exactly what happened last week in the case of the subway tragedy. Bystanders who did nothing while the man was in trouble rushed to his side once he had been hit and finally pulled to the platform -- then began snapping photos with their cellphone cameras. Within minutes, images of the victim were appearing on Facebook. The Chicago Tribune, in a searing editorial, said that at least before the age of the cellphone, all that New Yorkers did in such situations was stand and gawk. Now, they point and shoot.

In other words, the New York Post might have known its target audience better than we in Flagstaff could ever know -- at least I hope that's the case. We don't have a subway here to make a test case of the next "flash" mob. But when the next opportunity comes along for a group of Flagstaff citizens to avert a tragedy, we'd hope the ensuing story is about a response more substantive than the flash of a camera.

Randy Wilson is editor of the Arizona Daily Sun. You can reach him at rwilson@azdailysun.com or (928) 556-2254.