Not much point in omitting the People Dying part of Infotainment
I am reminded of coverage of wars where they apologize if something bad is shown.
If you didn't want to show something bad then airing a war was an odd choice in the first place.
There is a reason TV news covers chases and hostage incidents and a man on a ledge threatening to jump and people defusing bombs. The audience wants to see something terrible.
Is there really some journalistic virtue in "we just titillate and arouse the audience, but we don't get 'em off." I would suggest not titillating and arousing the ghoulish element in the first place, but I think funny...
There are TV shows about the World's Most Spectacular Car Crashes where they tell you at the top of the show that nobody died. (They do not, however, claim no brain trauma, burns, spinal cord injuries or amputations.)
The effective result of the "no on-air death" policy is the impression that it is actually impossible to die in a car crash.
I find the delicacy of our ghoulish culture to be like pasties... an affectation of modesty for the sake of the affectation. It obscures little but adds a veneer of decency by ever-implying that it could be "worse." Hey, we haven't gone as far as we can go... don't we get some credit for that?
