What's a man's life worth? For Dover paper, $120

The Lebanon Voice tries mightily to ignore the questionable journalistic ethics of that Dover paper, but today, try as we might, we can’t.

If anyone has seen the coverage of this week’s tragic standoff and suicide in Dover, they’ll understand why.

First, on Wednesday, editors saw fit to publish a staff photographer’s picture of the suicide victim’s body being removed by funeral home workers and staff from the medical examiner’s office.

Publishing the picture of a corpse being removed hardly advances the story, plus it’s just plain tawdry and insensitive to the family.

Most news organizations might send wire photos of a deceased despot like Khadafy or terrorist like Osama bin Laden.

But a local man whose soul went to a dark place from which he couldn’t escape?

We don’t know what he was going through.

We don’t know what went on that final day, in those final hours, inside his own head, inside his own apartment building.

Thankfully the woman he attacked is OK. We hope she is healing, too.

Many details of that tragic day have not yet come to light, but we do know one thing.

That Dover paper will charge the man’s grieving family about $120 to publish his obituary.

If you look at the obituary page of that Dover paper (which this writer did for the first time in about five years last week), you’ll see in a shaded (it should be shady) box: “Readers are reminded obituaries are a version of a paid advertisement.”

REALLY! GO ON, YOUR STORY’S GRIPPING ME! DO TELL!

Oh, and it does: “The content represents what the family and/or funeral home has submitted for publication,” it continues.

Now years ago, you wouldn’t have seen that shady, er, sorry, shaded box in that Dover paper. Because long ago, in a time far away, local papers didn’t charge their readers’ families money to put the paper’s own former reader’s obituary in the dern paper!

Even according to that most modernistic paragon of cyber-knowledge, Wikipedia, obituaries are “news stories” that recount a person’s life after they pass. Read, Dover paper: Not an ad.

So that Dover paper has to “remind” us silly readers daily as we read the obits, so when someone dies and the funeral homes asks if you want to put an ad in so relatives and friends can grieve, you’ll stare at them numbly and say yes. Cha-ching!

Every day they have to school us on the new normal.

I guess you lose one revenue stream (called advertising). You gotta get another.

The ironic thing is that if the “Greatest Generation” didn’t still cling to its habits of liking to hold a newspaper in their hands, that Dover paper probably would’ve unplugged the old printing press a few years ago.

So they continue to extort a little extra cash after they pass. That would be even more ironic, if it weren’t just sad.

If that Dover paper were still downtown you could probably find its moral compass in the Cocheco River. But it’s not, so this writer would point you to the woods near the Spaulding.

Like Elvis, it’s certainly left the building.

- HT