In the past two weeks, for example, I have received two dozen or so calls and e-mails from readers upset over the use of photographs on the front page that showed, at least partially, the bodies of women killed by the shooter terrorizing this area. In the Oct. 4 paper, the body was on a bench outside a post office and was fully draped by a bloodstained cloth with only a foot visible. On Oct. 15 the victim was lying prone in a Home Depot parking lot. She was covered, only partially visible and not identifiable. Both were dramatic images, conveying, in my view, the news and reality of what had happened in a powerful yet non-sensational fashion.
But readers who complained saw it differently and took great offense. They said that the photos were “too raw,” that running them “showed a lack of respect for the women and their families,” and that they would amplify the horror for children. Many said the photos were simply “not necessary” when “everyone is so frightened.”
At internal news conferences in the evening, when front-page pictures as well as stories are available, senior editors spend a lot of time discussing these things. An especially long discussion took place, I’m told, about the Oct. 4 picture, which the photo editors believed should be the main photo on the page. After a lot of debate, the decision was made to use it as a smaller, secondary photograph in an effort to strike a balance between conveying the news and not being excessively graphic. Five people had been shot dead within a 17-hour span that day, which turned out to be the start of the shooting spree. “There would be hundreds of inches of prose in that next day’s newspaper,” said night photo editor Luis Rios, “but that will never match the impact of that photo. This didn’t just happen once. It happened five times and it put the horror of the day more clearly.”
So The Post, using its own internal sensors, played down the most powerful picture it had on the first day of the shooting spree, but some readers felt that even that was too much. These issues never go away and are almost always decided case by case. But they are discussed.
The Comics section of last Sunday’s Post included, as usual, the “Boondocks” strip on the front page. Except it wasn’t the strip that had been scheduled to run. Post readers, naturally, had no way of knowing about the substitution. I found out when some fellow ombudsmen e-mailed their colleagues asking if many complaints had been raised about that Sunday’s “Boondocks.” The one that ran in other papers, but not in The Post, played off the comments last month of a German official who compared President Bush’s tactics on diverting public opinion with those of Adolf Hitler.
“Boondocks” is a clever and edgy comic strip by 28-year-old African American artist Aaron McGruder. It generates a small but steady stream of complaints and has been pulled a few times since it started in 1999. Executive Editor Len Downie said about last Sunday’s decision that it was a matter of taste: “We edit the newspaper, all of it, including the comics. The only way we can edit comics is by choosing to run or not to run each strip. We review them all for taste and legal issues. ‘Boondocks’ is not the only comic that has occasionally not been run.”
The Chicago Tribune ran the McGruder strip, and its ombudsman, Don Wycliff, noted in a column afterward that complaints often come from readers who believe McGruder is allowed to get away with some things because he is black. “It would probably be more accurate to say,” Wycliff wrote, “that he is able to see the things he sees because he is black. Loath though many Americans are to accept it nowadays, having a different historical perspective . . . gives one a different perspective on life and issues. And that perspective, while not the sole determinant of a person’s point of view, will assert itself in ways and places both expected and unexpected — even, sometimes, on the funny pages.”
