Breaking News: Businesses Like Profits

Anyone surprised? People seem to be judging by how much bitching I've seen in the last week about NBC's decision to air the cleverly named 'killer tapes.' In the last three days I have read articles by the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Washington Post regarding the moral outrage of grief-strickn viewers who saw the tapes and have since joined up with the rest of the right-wing Hypocrite Police to bitch about something they probably watched every time it came on air.

I take that back actually - it would be a mistake to assume all people aren't equally stupid (and I say stupid because they're not intelligent enough to realize they are hypocrites and shut the hell up). Now I'm only a 4th year political science major, so I could have this wrong, but last time I checked economics functions principally through the laws of supply and demand. If a product is in short supply, it is in higher demand. Expanding that out a bit, if a product is scarce, its value increases (example? gold, diamonds, all precious metals are nothing more than rare, shiny objects). Our behavior has taught every business that pays attention to give us what we want and give it to us now. If you want to call what happened at NBC a monstrosity, what does that say about the mad scientist?

We live in a hyper-capitalist consumer-oriented society and then we get our panties in a bunch when news organizations act like we do, when it's us who have allowed them to be owned and operated like a fucking business. So what the hell does any of this have to do with airing those tapes? Ratings. If the same idiots who are complaining about those tapes didn't watch them 30 times each the networks would have never aired them anyway (and I feel compelled to mention here that all of them aired the tapes and are now on the naught-NBC bandwagon to deflect criticism from themselves for making the exact same decision). I'm defending their airing and I haven't even watched them, and here's why: I'm insulted by people who argue that a supposedly-independent, free press should censor our information for us. These are the same people arguing against Howard Stern and Don Imus, the same people who want more censorship everywhere because they're shitty parents.

That kind of mentality short changes our own agency in the process, which isn't really all that surprising because anyone that is bitching about these tapes has probably shortchanged their own agency already. If you don't like it, don't watch it. And as for the ridiculous claims that the tapes alone are somehow encouraging copycat crimes...well, I already said it, they're ridiculous. Do you want to know what has encouraged people to perpetrate the same kind of crimes as the Columbine kids and Cho? The relentless 2-week long 24-hour news coverage of this tragedy, the way we can't seem to talk about anything else, the way it forces us to raise issues which have been pressing for years but no one seems to give a shit about it until 33 people die (which I feel compelled to point out is so insignificant in the grand scheme of things). If kids think notoriety will come from their crimes, it's because they know the vast majority of Americans are so ignorant they'll watch it without even understanding why. And as long as we are willing to watch them kill people, the news stations will air whatever material they live behind.

Now without further adieu I'm going to post the videos in the vain hopes of increasing traffic to this site and thus raising my grade.