Dead/ Dying

Posted on the 05 December 2012 by Altfeedback @altfeedback

How far is too far? The question echoes across the history of authentic mediated depictions of the dead and dying. The NY Post begs the question with its Tuesday cover: a photo of Queens native Ki Suk Han about to be struck and killed by an oncoming subway train.

The commercial urge to shock for revenue, now more evident than ever a “race to the bottom” among flailing, embarrassingly desperate print publications like the NY Post, looks intriguingly like the merging of tabloid journalism and real journalism. The convergence of the will-to-shock and the real into a distilled pseudo-reality (pseudo by omission) is frightening. It’s a primitive ancestor of fear-mongering-for-cash (the essence of our country’s most recent military misadventures.)

Hopefully when print journalism has issued its final death-rattles, the denizens of the internet will step up to the plate, and find a way to commercialize responsible, quality news. Rather than exploiting the innocent dead, and highlighting random criminal evil for a cheap buck. Let’s move on.

-Max Berwald