Did the NY Post cross the line with Tuesday’s morbid cover photo?

Call it crap, fodder, entertainment, a joke. But people still buy the daily rag sheet.

This week, the paper’s editor faced a serious ethical conundrum when a freelance photographer came back to the newsroom after snapping a picture of 58-year-old Ki-Suck Han, who was pushed onto subway tracks by a stranger. As the victim tries frantically to climb off the tracks, the train barrels towards him.

Click. Click. Click.

The photographer, R. Umar Abbasi, has to decide in a split second: Try to help this desperate human being or do my job. His choice made the front page of the paper on Dec. 4—a decision by Abbasi and his editor that that many people blasted.

Abbasi defended his actions in a series of TV and print interviews on Tuesday and Wednesday. During an interview on the “Today” show, he told hosts Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie:

“It took me a second to figure out what is happening. The only thing I could think of at the time was to alert the driver with my camera flash, and I started running.”