Sorry JJ, Shakran, everyone - having a really rough day here, didn't mean to lash out at you.
Edit: By the way, I'm not levelling this at the American public exclusively. I'm an inclusive misanthropic fuck. I hate everyone equally.
I think I should clarify, since my previous post was a bit of a rant:
No, I'm not saying our fascination with television
excuses it, because I think the whole debacle is a complete mess. There is no excuse for
any of this, none at all. But on the flipside, looking at the reality of it, you can hardly blame the people on the ground doing what's expected of them, because it's just the way the world works.
When you're in business, you go where the money is, right? The media exists primarily (and nowadays, increasingly exclusively) to skewer you to your seat with news, entertainment, music, whatever, long enough so that you'll get to the advertisements, and so the network gets its payday. That's how the business works.
Currently, the ratings are with the networks that give you what you want. In the case of news, it's getting there first, getting the juiciest stuff before anyone else. In this case, that would be tears of joy from families who've just been informed that their relatives, thought dead, are okay. That's the killer angle. That's what everyone wants to see. As sad as you or I might find it, that's the meat of the story. Joe Blow will hear that the mine failed however many safety inspections and go 'that's a damn shame', but he'll sit down and watch agog if there's some homely soccer mom bawling her guts out live on air because she just heard her son got exploded to death. That's what gets the asses on the seats, and the viewing figures through the roof. Because it's compelling, it's real, it's genuine human drama.
And it's where the money is. If we (as a people) didn't buy into this shit, it wouldn't exist. It's a self-propelling phenomenon.
The same argument exists for every other form of advertisment-funded, or commercial media. Why do you think Reality TV is such a hot property nowadays? People sit down to swallow it like baby birds, and it's cheap as chips to make. That's why TV is in such a dire state. That's why things like Harry Potter movies and books are hyped to the ceiling (which in my opinion explains a large proportion of their popularity, especially among adults - although that's just my axe to grind.
).
Basically, what I'm saying is, it only exists because we let it.
It's fucked up, yes, but it's who we are.