While glancing through your Metro section on May 21, I couldn’t help but fix my gaze upon the photo on Page 5. It showed a couple of grim-faced relatives holding on to a sobbing woman, her torso bent and face contorted with grief “as the body of her husband . . . is recovered near Foster Avenue Beach,” the caption explained.
What a technically brilliant photograph. Powerful stuff. Made me stop and look, and no doubt thousands of others did also. But what’s the point? Did “the public’s right to know” really justify invading that poor woman’s privacy at such a terrible moment? I doubt this picture will make that widow’s scrapbook.
Ironically, this was in the same edition as Mike Royko’s column about the “gotcha” crowd of journalists who hounded Adm. Jeremy Boorda into committing suicide. As usual, Royko hit the nail on the head.
What is it about journalism that turns so many of its practitioners into voyeurs and ghouls?
