A Photo May Be Worth 1,000 Words, But Readers Thought This One Was One Too Many

It's all too easy for a newspaper to rile its readers' sensibilities, as the following instance illustrates.

A Page One photo Nov. 16 showing an African American police officer peering out a window at a Cedarbrook murder scene brought dozens of complaints from readers who felt The Inquirer was making "a deliberate attempt to denigrate black people," as one put it.

John Costello's photo was a compelling news shot of the policeman at a second-floor window at the home where Hope Thomas was murdered. A headline declared "Nightmare in Cedarbrook," while the caption read: "A masked gunman left a woman dead and her young daughter tied up and traumatized inside this Cedarbrook house late Tuesday. Yesterday, a police officer at the scene peered from a second-floor window. The girl managed to escape and notify her grandmother. The gunman was at large."

The initial impression for many readers was that the man in the photo was the killer who was about to be arrested. Wrong.

The display was published in all editions except the 65,000-copy late Sports Final, when it was replaced by a picture of the Christmas light show at Hecht's Center City department store.

Dozens of readers were outraged. "How could you put such a picture in the paper, unfairly stereotyping African Americans and playing to the fears of white people?" a woman shouted. "That's irresponsibility of the highest order," said Shelley Yanoff, executive director of Philadelphians for Children and Youth.

A Cedarbrook woman said: "I saw that picture - and particularly the headline - and I understood instantly why African Americans feel they don't get a fair shake. This is incredibly irresponsible and shows a horrible lack of sensitivity."

A Camden County woman added: "The picture alone is bad enough. You can barely see the badge and you don't know the man is a policeman until you read the caption - and not even until the second line of it. But then that headline, obviously intended to frighten people, made it even worse."

The readers are right that it was a serious error. But it was not deliberate and was corrected as soon as staffers saw it in print. Steve Glynn, night news editor, felt the photo was movingly evocative of the murder scene and was the best news photo of the day. And the original print clearly showed the policeman's uniform - and his badge.