Honestly, gang–what IS it with your seemingly gleeful fascination with rape? (“Another Serial Rapist,” Feb. 10.) Not a month seems to pass in which the cover of RedEye isn’t graced with some panic-inducing image of predatory bloodlust. If the art direction is to be taken literally, your readers would be left with no choice but to give up and flee the city, which presumably is crawling with drooling, hungry sexual predators ready to strike.
Rape’s a serious subject, no doubt, and you can’t ignore the stories. But it’s one thing to provide a public service and give your readers a clue. It’s entirely another to give a very serious subject the “Korn video-meets-‘Law & Order'” treatment and scare people into submission.
Rape is not entertainment, yet RedEye seems to regularly sell papers with the mindset that it is. The approach to the subject is, at best, embarrassing. At worst, it’s alarming.
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Edited by Lara Weber (lweber@tribune.com) and Joe Knowles (jknowles@tribune.com)
