In browsing through "On The Media" this week, I noticed something unusual. The first two stories listed (and thus the two stories most likely to be watched) were about people who were dead. The first story spoke about the obituaries for Boris Yeltsin, and the next story focussed on the war exploits of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman. While Jessica Lynch isn't dead, Pat Tillman and Boris Yeltsin certainly are. This leads to an interesting question: are dead people just more interesting than live people, or did they just have nothing to talk about this week?
I would submit that the first assumption is more correct. Dead people are almost always more interesting than people who are alive. When we turn on the news, we expect to see stories of people being shot, or the heroic death of a fireman, or the tragic death of an innocent in the wrong place at the wrong time. On the other hand, we rarely care about people who are living and succeeding. Because we spend all day trying to "succeed" at life and get more money or a better car, we don't want to come home and see people on TV doing better than we think we're doing. Instead, we need to feel like we accomplished something today. To hear that there are three more people in the world who won't be doing better than we are is a reassurance that the work we did on that day is actually worth something.
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I do not know whether to agree or disagree with you. I fell that most people are more interested in stories where people have been hurt or killed. But i not agree with the fact that it makes us feel better about ourselfs when we see someone dead or die on the news. If i go to work and then come home to see that; I really dont feel a whole lot better than I did before. I guess I just dont understand where you were going with this. When people pass away, I hope people do not take advantage to feel better about themselves but to feel greatful to still be functioning.
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