bystanders

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

“It all happened so fast.”

That’s what R. Umar Abbasi, a freelance photographer for The New York Post, said of the fatal subway incident on Monday that he caught with his camera. One man threw another into harm’s way, causing him to be run over by an oncoming train. This last part happened in the blink of a shutter.

But the decision to put the image on the The Post’s cover and frame it with a lurid headline that said “this man is about to die”? That part didn’t happen quickly. The treatment of the photo was driven by a moral and commercial calculus that was sickening to behold. (If the image is not already burned into your skull, it can be found all over the Web, including in The New York Times’s City Room blog. Tut-tutting about a salacious photo here while enjoying the benefits of its replication seems inappropriate.)

And it’s not just the media commentators who are weighing in. Twitter crackled with invective and recriminations. Every once in a while a journalism ethics question actually engages the public, and so it was with the brutally documented death of Ki-Suck Han, 58, of Elmhurst, Queens. Here are some guesses why.

1. Within its four corners, The Post cover treatment neatly embodies everything people hate and suspect about the news media business: not only are journalists bystanders, moral and ethical eunuchs who don’t intervene when danger or evil presents itself, but perhaps they secretly root for its culmination.

2. We are all implicated by this photo, not just the man who took it. The ensuing coverage talked about how “graphic” the image was, but there is nothing graphic about it. Photographs of the dead are graphic, but they are of people on the other side, the ones that are beyond hope. Here there was no blood, no carnage, only someone who is doomed, but still among us. (The photographs of the jumpers from the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center are considered tasteless for the same reason.)

The picture of a man alone on a track in one of the most crowded cities in the world is a reminder that when bad things happen, we are often very much alone. The photographer did not put down his camera and attempt to intervene, but no one else on that platform set aside their fears and chose to act, either. And that indifference to the misery and peril of others is not restricted to that platform, or this city, or this country. It is widespread and endemic, an ugly fact about much of the world.

3. The fear evoked by the photo is primal, the stuff of horrid fairy tales. New Yorkers will see it in acutely personal ways. Subways are a quotidian aspect of life here, but with their close quarters and hurtling trains, the platforms are also potential kill boxes. Does that big scary homeless guy want a quarter or does he want to push me off this platform? More generally, out in the world, public spaces have become fraught. Movie theaters, workplaces and college campuses are common areas that can, and do, become wholesale crime scenes.

4. The image is a kind of crucible of self-analysis. Never mind what the photographer did, what would we do? In that sudden moment, our base impulses emerge. Photographers shoot, heroes declare, and most of us cower. We are not soldiers, expected to engage in selfless acts that trump survival instincts. We are civilians and if called to duty, who among us will accept? (I couldn’t help but think of the four friends who perished in the roiling waters of upstate New York’s Split Rock Falls in 2003, after one slipped in and the others, one by one, tried to save him.)

In the Aurora, Colo., movie shooting incident, some died while shielding others. And it is highly likely that others scrambled over smaller or slower people to flee. The other reason people can’t resist looking (and wish to unsee once they do)? That train is coming for all of us, one way or another. Death comes on its own schedule and we won’t know our time is up until the light of an oncoming train manifests itself.

5. The tabloid values that mark modern news media existence work fine when a celebrity tips over or a rich perpetrator is caught red-handed, but not so much when death is imminent. I’m not immune to the blunt, dirty pleasure of a well-executed tabloid cover, but there were many other images to choose from. Never mind the agency of the photo — it doesn’t matter whether the photographer was using his flash to warn, as he suggested, or documenting the death of a man — once it is the can, it should have stayed there.

Instead, The New York Post milked the death of someone for maximum commercial effect, with a full-page photo inside of his frozen helplessness, replete with helpful pointers to show the train bearing down and, on the Web, a video about the photographer’s experience that was a kind of slow-motion deconstruction. The marginal civic good served by the story — watch yourself on the subway platform — could have been performed in far more honorable ways. He ended up run over twice.

It’s not always simple. When a colleague at The Times jumped from our old building in 2002, The Post ran a photo of the building with a dotted line indicating his descent. People at our shop were appalled, but I found myself in the minority. His act was a very public one, he apparently wanted to send a message, and The Post was merely serving as a conduit. And when The New York Times came under fire in August for running on our Web site an extremely graphic photo of a victim in the Empire State Building shooting, I thought it was appropriate at the time. The victim was not recognizable and the blood that ran from him was a reminder that, unlike the way it is portrayed on television, gun crime is extremely violent. But his family was livid and I wonder how I would have felt if I had known him.

Soon enough, new boundaries will be tested. In an era when most people have a camera in their hand or pocket, mass shootings will be memorialized on cellphone videos and ubiquitous security cameras will dish up fresh horrors. I’d like to think that the people’s right to know will be leavened by the people’s right to live in a world where mayhem is not a commodity.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/train-wreck-the-new-york-posts-subway-cover/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Releasing quarterly updates of three reports on the outlooks for the economy, debt and global financial stability, the fund cut its estimates of global growth this year to 3.25 percent, from the 4 percent it forecast in September, on “sharply escalated” risks emanating from Europe.

In light of that market uncertainty and sluggish growth, the fund is seeking to raise up to $500 billion in additional lending capacity. It is also calling on the European Union to expand its bailout fund to at least $1 trillion from its current capacity of 440 billion euros, or about $570 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the negotiations.

José Viñals, director of the I.M.F.’s monetary and capital markets department, told reporters that the fund sought to build a “global firewall” — both to help ease the euro crisis and to ensure that no bystanders to it find themselves locked out of the global financing markets.

In a speech in Berlin on Monday, Christine Lagarde, managing director of the fund, said: “The longer we wait, the worse it will get. The only solution is to move forward together.” She call on the world to help bolster the I.M.F.’s resources and on Europe to bolster its own. “The world must find the political will to do what it knows must be done.”

In its quarterly update, the fund said that “risks to stability have increased, despite various policy steps to contain the euro area debt crisis and banking problems.”

The I.M.F. cited continued high financing costs for European countries and weakness in European banks as two risks that had the capability to intensify each other and lead to “sizable contractions” in economic activity.

Other risks include investor fear over the debts of big countries like the United States and Japan, a “hard landing” in emerging economies and spiraling oil prices as the European bloc and the United States confront Iran.

The fund cut its growth forecasts for every region in the world, as well as for trade and commodity prices. The fund now estimates that Europe will experience a mild 0.1 percent contraction — down from a September forecast of 1.4 percent growth — with a sharper contraction of 0.5 percent among the 17 countries that use the euro currency and deeper recessions in Italy and Spain. It also cut its estimate of global trade volumes.

The I.M.F. did not change its growth forecast for the United States, however. Speaking with reporters, Olivier Blanchard, the fund’s chief economist, said that the “good and bad news” about the American economy were “more or less canceling each other” out: The country’s economic growth is now self-sustaining, but a Europe in recession and a slowdown in emerging-markets promise to weigh on the United States in 2012.

The fund also made a stark warning about the safety of the American financial system. The fund said that “potential spillovers” from the euro area crisis might “include direct exposures of U.S. banks to euro-area banks, or the sale of U.S. assets by European banks.”

In recent months, American regulators and policy makers have played down such risks, pointing to sharply reduced exposure to Europe among money-market funds and investment banks.

The I.M.F. also warned that the United States might turn to austerity budgeting too soon, imperiling its own recovery. Carlo Cottarelli, the director of the fiscal affairs department, cited such premature fiscal tightening as a “concrete risk.” He noted that the steep, automatic budget cuts put into place by Congress last year would lead to the biggest hit to spending in four decades. He called for a more “gradual decline in the deficit.”

The same advice applies to the rest of the world, the fund said. Mr. Cottarelli warned that “both too little and too much adjustment will be bad for growth. Both extremes will be bad for growth.” The main risk is that too many countries will cut their budgets too deeply, too soon, sapping demand from the still-weak global economy.

Mr. Viñals, the director of the I.M.F.’s monetary and capital markets department, acknowledged that bond yields had declined in Europe in recent weeks. But he warned it “should not be taken for granted, as some sovereign debt markets remain under stress and bank funding markets are on life support by the European Central Bank.”

Banks should continue to deleverage, the fund said, adding that they should do so by raising funds, rather than reducing credit and thus hampering economic activity.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=807f1c7a0e415b8150875230af923623

Media Decoder Blog: Train Wreck: The New York Post’s Subway Cover

I.M.F. Reduces Estimates for Global Growth

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