For the fourth time this school year, a student at New York University has committed suicide by leaping from a tall structure.
Diana Chien, 19, leapt to her death on Saturday, and police are alluding to problems with her boyfriend as a possible cause for her suicide. The tragedy of Chien’s death was only the beginning, thanks to the work of tasteless, shoddy journalism.
On Sunday, the New York Post published a chilling photograph apparently taken seconds after Chien jumped from her boyfriend’s 24-story apartment building in Manhattan. According to the Associated Press, the Post originally ran the photo on the inside of its Sunday edition; but today, upon learning the girl’s identity, the Post re-ran the photograph on the front page, with the headline “Death plunge No. 4: NYU’s grief.” The picture is in full color, and takes up the entire front page, with the girl’s limp figure accompanied by the headline and the first few paragraph’s of the story.
The Post’s treatment of the story is an appalling display of cheap, irresponsible journalism. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, newspapers all around the country were forced to contemplate running pictures of people who jumped from the inferno inside the World Trade Center towers, making the ultimate choice to end their lives by their own accord, and not suffer a long, painful death inside. Some newspapers refused to run the pictures, and some, including the Post, chose to include them as part of the story. That debate had merit, because the pictures of the victims put in the most impossible of circumstances were, in some part, a part of the story on the whole. The Massachusetts Daily Collegian never displayed any of those photos, but we understand the views of those publications that felt it was important to include them.
This is a different story, and should have been handled much differently by a newspaper as popular as the Post. The fact that the photo ever ran in the first place is subject to argument, and the further exploitation of a community’s tragedy in order to sell more newspapers shows a horrendous lack of journalistic integrity. The story could have been told just as well without the photograph to accompany it, and running the photo a second time, this time in large, full-color format, shows that the Post has completely disavowed its responsibility to inform in favor of sensationalizing a poor young woman’s plight, as well as that of the people who knew her.
The story isn’t much better, though it was more competently written than the front page was designed. It references the three previous student suicides at NYU, and although it reports that one of the students “jumped from the sixth floor of a Greenwich Village apartment building after smoking a joint and declaring, ‘I can’t take it anymore,’ ” it was otherwise professional and responsible in its handling of this tragedy. It can be assumed that, as at most papers, the writers had nothing to do with the layout of the front page, so the onus falls on whichever editor was in charge of that job. That person, or those persons, has shown an incredible lack of character and compassion for the subjects they cover.
Newspapers exist to report facts. They also exist as businesses, and the Post must compete in a tenacious market. So it is understandable that the Post’s large, crass headlines and sometimes fluffy news coverage is vital to securing the paper’s niche in the New York news landscape. However, a person’s death should never be treated simply as fodder for the Post’s brand of attention-hounding journalism. The Collegian will make every effort to insure to its readers that no such mishandling of a tragedy such as this will occur within its pages.
Unsigned editorials represent the majority opinion of The Massachusetts Daily Collegian Editorial Board.
