"X Marks the Spot"

People resent the sight of a corpse because it reminds them of their own mortality. Cherishing the memory of the dead one, they treat his clay with reverence although secretly detesting the stiff and putrefying souvenir left behind. If a corpse must lie in the same room with the quick, its face is covered with a cloth or dissembled with cosmetics. Newspapers have recognized this unwillingness to look up on cadavers, and it has been a journalistic tradition never to print pictures of those killed by violence except for purposes of identification, and then only after the photograph has been retouched. Instead of showing the actual body when reproducing the scene of a murder, a stock phrase was used, " X marks the spot. . . ." How this phrase is vanishing from journalism was deplorably demonstrated last week by two Manhattan gum-chewers' sheets.

The Daily News was first. In its pages appeared the photograph of a man who had just been struck by a truck. He was shown lying on his back on the pavement, a disheveled white-faced form, under the caption SPEEDY WORK BY CAMERA MAN. As a matter of fact, the "speedy work" was not so notable as it might have seemed, for the accident had occurred within a stone's throw of the editorial rooms of the News; a camera man had merely to dash down stairs and run a block to take the offensive photograph. In this example of horrifying journalism there was the smell of an excuse, for the victim had not been killed--merely knocked down, internally injured, and fractured in the skull. There was life in the corpselike shape--all that was earthly of one John Flake.

No such circumstance could be brought forward to extenuate the revolting offense perpetrated two days later by the Hearst Evening Journal. A life-beaten, despairing, undernourished Jew, one David Belinsky, deserted by his wife, had taken the lives of his tiny twin boys and committed suicide. The Journal reporter hurried to the Broad Street Hospital, where the two babies--five months old--were lying side by side after they had been pronounced dead. He took their picture as they lay there-- the dry mouths contorted in the gape of their last, desperate expiration, their heads twisted sidewise on the pillow. ISADORE AND MORRIS BELINSKY DEAD IN BED headlined the Evening Journal

The News, the Journal, are quite capable of gauging the taste of their readers, which is also the taste of those individuals who, appearing automatically like sharks or vultures when a killing has occurred, jostle one another for a glimpse of the body while the blue-coated officer pushes them back. Such people pored with great enjoyment over the photograph of the maimed Flake, of the dead Belinskys, enchanted that from their favorite newspapers that annoying phrase, "X marks the spot," has disappeared.