The Moment They Sold

The New York Post is tabloid pure—the American BILD, built to sell scandal. When the real sensational stuff won’t fly, you angle the story until something horrible looks marketable. Newspapers need readers; readers need outrage.

Ki Suk Han was 58. A father. A husband. Last night he was pushed onto the subway tracks by a man nobody knew. A photographer named R. Umar Abbasi was standing there. He got the final seconds on film—the moment before the train came.

The Post put it on the cover.

Not a photograph of the man who pushed him. Not a photo of Ki Suk Han alive, remembered. Just those last seconds, documented and sold.

Twitter reacted the way it always does for something like this. People losing their minds. Shame on you, you contemptible pseudo-humans, someone wrote. Another said the Post wasn’t a real newspaper. Another pointed out that the photographer had time to take multiple shots but not to help.

And here’s where it gets complicated. Abbasi claimed he was trying to warn the driver with his camera flash, to force them to stop, because he knew he couldn’t pull the man up himself. The Post ran that explanation. Maybe it’s even true. But who can prove otherwise?

What it shows is how far newspapers are willing to push now that print is dying. They need that image, need that cover, need something raw enough to move papers one more time. So they use it. Then you wonder what the BILD or the Post will do next, when this stops working too.