Fox News just aired a suicide live

How much was that networked fined for Janet's tit flash?

What you reckon should Fox pay for this?

^ lol

boom

agree with Hoodie. Some other good points in the thread as well.

1) I agree news shouldn't be covering it, unless the crime the guy committed rose to a high level of newsworthiness (for example, a just-occurred homicide). Too often it's not about the newsworthiness, but just how gripping the high-speed chase looks.

2) Exposure to the deaths that occur in "real life" can actually be useful and even eye-opening. I used to visit ogrish which was the ONLY place on the net that had uncensored pics of the war in Iraq. Thanks to them, I got to see what roadside bombs really looked like. I got to see the terrorists exulting as they filmed themselves detonating the bomb. I also got to see people who had driven to roadside checkpoints and then got watermelon-sized holes in their heads after the US guards overreacted and shot them with some ridiculously overpowered weaponry. I got to see US soldier in Afghanistan exploding taliban heads with sniper shells like they were gophers. I got to watch guys in drones and specter gunships blowing dozens of people up in night vision like it was a video game.

Not showing things like that is a greater crime than showing it.

And by the way, there is such a thing as appropriate, but still compassionate desensitization. Doctors have it. They know the body is just a sack of often faulty meat, but somewhere buried inside most of them probably keep a certain faith that what they do is good and right. I think most of us these days are a lot like them, more desensitized than we should be perhaps, but still compassionate.

yep.

if it were up to me, everytime a nation went to war, the citizens of said nation should be required to watch one-two hours of war casualty footage every week...if not every day.

damn lumie...

Budd, don't!

in regards to ogrish i can't help but agree. There are odd exceptions to the 'its not ok to show actual death on television rule'. I saw JFK get his brains blown out when i was around 10 years old and it wasn't presented with a disclaimer.

i find it funny Smith was so apologetic and 'sorry' for showing a live suicide on TV, what the fuck did they expect to happen? The only reason to show a live car case in the first place is for sensationalism and the secret (well not so secret) hope that something really awful is going to happen at the end of the chase. I'm failing to come up with a good analogy but it's comical to see Foxnews expressing embarrassment for going too far.

oh yeah i forgot to mention that when we did the fake beheading hoax, every single news outlet in the country who wanted to talk to us basically set us up for some kind of forced apology for 'offending' the families of victims of terrorism....really? So when all of you guys showed Nick Berg being beheaded on TV you don't think that deserves any sort of apology? The level of hypocrisy in the mainstream news is hard to grasp

Agree with Smetty and Awepittance. Awepittance, I remember your hoax - you staged a beheading with GI Joes right? It was pretty close to being believable. I was fairly new to watmm at the time and I remember how cool I thought it was to learn the guy who perpetrated the hoax was a member here.

Those beheading videos were completely jaw-dropping. In total there were like 30 of them or more, I downloaded them all and saved them to a DVD, but could only ever watch one or two, peeping between my fingers. The audio was as bad or worse than the visuals. Somewhere that DVD is burning a hole straight to hell through the floor of my parent's house.

Funny thing is though, thinking of desensitization, how detached we are from the food animals we consume. I went to visit my future in-laws in the countryside in China recently, we were going to eat lunch together and they asked "do you want goose or chicken?" I said goose, and they went out through the back door, grabbed a goose, and proceeded to slice its throat on the kitchen floor in full view of me (the guest and future son-in-law they had met 5 mins before). I wasn't "appalled", but it was a bit shocking to be making casual conversation while this goose is feebly kicking out his last moments as his lifeblood gurgled out. I wonder if the Taliban dudes weren't so bothered by the beheadings because heck, they had done it a million times before with farm animals. And would we be so morally outraged if we saw throat cutting as just another way to put an animal (human or otherwise) to death? Is it worse than lynching, electricity, firing squad, gas?

'pure and unbiased coverage? absolutely. unless it's al-jazeera, wikileaks, or unintentional shit on fox news'. end of story.

  On 9/29/2012 at 2:58 AM, Smettingham Rutherford IV said:

  On 9/29/2012 at 1:57 AM, Salvatorin said:

It makes my skin crawl to think about the overwhelming pointlessness of one's own suicide being digested with secret glee by millions of people through a tv screen. It reminded me of the chase in fahrenheit 451, a whole society of people watching you stumble and blunder, wishing you dead. There is some dignity in a private death, between two parties. The hovering dehumanizing insect eyebot of television brings on some aggressive nihilism, maan.

Glee might be exaggerating it a bit. Actually, a lot. Morbid curiosity, yes....but glee? What millions are you referring to?

well, fox news has millions of viewers, daily. I think somewhere between 1-2 million on average. I think the 'glee' i was thinking about is that kind of redneck breakdown of common decency that happens when the right messages aren't coming across. Maybe some kid is sitting with his big brothers or something, he sees the guy shoot himself on tv, is scared, the brothers hide their fear and shock by shrugging it off, or even cheering it on, creating some context to make it 'okay'. I've seen that kind of stuff happen a lot. Gummo shit, you know? Some sort of culturally-inherited Inability to logically process certain emotional situations.

a machismo expressed in aggressively anti-social, dehumanizing tendencies. There probably were people enjoying the car chase, fascinated by it, then they might have been caught off guard, disturbed by the suicide. Maybe most will never watch a chase again. But why were they watching it to begin with? It is some kind of media-culture circuit. And perhaps a portion of people were strangely thrilled by the suicide, pretending to be disgusted, and really wish they could see it again. You know? If whatever barrier -that is making viewers actively watch the chase, partially for entertainment, and then turn off in disgust and shock after the suicide- erodes, what is to stop the media from shifting towards death-olympics?

I like a lot of the things that people are saying. What I haven't seen anyone bring up is the fact that this footage was most likely aired intentionally. We have the nice footage of the reporter shouting to cut but, in all likelihood, there was a producer or someone standing behind the camera and making sure that the whole thing got shown. What I find upsetting about this isn't the fact that the footage exists or that it has been made widely available, but that this pretty horrific event is being offered up as commercial entertainment.

if it was supposed to be entertaining, the could at least have invested in a better zoom lens

car chases are cool and exciting, by the amount of shit fox is getting about this i doubt the suicide was aired intentionally

  On 9/29/2012 at 2:40 AM, fiznuthian said:

To be fair the guy was putting innocent lives in danger

 

The thought of him running over a dog at 80 mph unnerves me, let alone hitting an actual pedestrian.

 

yeah. i'd be more concerned if he hit somebody's dog or cat or child, than him blowing his own brains out, to be honest.

  On 9/29/2012 at 12:56 AM, tauboo said:

  On 9/28/2012 at 11:02 PM, RandySicko said:

  On 9/28/2012 at 10:57 PM, Hoodie said:

I don't see what the big deal is. Death happens.

 

Desensitized much?

 

This is why I don't watch tv. Fucking death obsessed culture... this shit is mind altering.

head in sand much?

You do have to realize that what you see on tv isn't reality most of the times, however realistic it may appear. Note he said 'culture' which includes entertainment as well. Not basing your world view on what you see on tv is everything but putting your head in the sand.

  On 9/29/2012 at 3:59 AM, Awepittance said:

we did the fake beheading hoax

is there a thread about this somewhere?

  On 9/29/2012 at 4:47 AM, lumpenprol said:

Agree with Smetty and Awepittance. Awepittance, I remember your hoax - you staged a beheading with GI Joes right? It was pretty close to being believable. I was fairly new to watmm at the time and I remember how cool I thought it was to learn the guy who perpetrated the hoax was a member here.

 

Those beheading videos were completely jaw-dropping. In total there were like 30 of them or more, I downloaded them all and saved them to a DVD, but could only ever watch one or two, peeping between my fingers. The audio was as bad or worse than the visuals. Somewhere that DVD is burning a hole straight to hell through the floor of my parent's house.

 

Funny thing is though, thinking of desensitization, how detached we are from the food animals we consume. I went to visit my future in-laws in the countryside in China recently, we were going to eat lunch together and they asked "do you want goose or chicken?" I said goose, and they went out through the back door, grabbed a goose, and proceeded to slice its throat on the kitchen floor in full view of me (the guest and future son-in-law they had met 5 mins before). I wasn't "appalled", but it was a bit shocking to be making casual conversation while this goose is feebly kicking out his last moments as his lifeblood gurgled out. I wonder if the Taliban dudes weren't so bothered by the beheadings because heck, they had done it a million times before with farm animals. And would we be so morally outraged if we saw throat cutting as just another way to put an animal (human or otherwise) to death? Is it worse than lynching, electricity, firing squad, gas?

definitely with you on the animal front, if you eat meat, you should be able to handle watching an animal die and get hacked up for your dining experience. that's why ive forced myself to go hunting in the past.

Could have been worse, could have been nudity, Americans couldn't handle that on national TV.

side note: I'd like to read a thread about lumenprol's video watching as I can't watch that stuff myself but would be a fascinating read.

Wicked, I hope they get fined a shit load.

  On 9/29/2012 at 4:11 PM, jules said:

side note: I'd like to read a thread about lumenprol's video watching as I can't watch that stuff myself but would be a fascinating read.

for science!

  On 9/29/2012 at 1:06 PM, eugene said:

car chases are cool and exciting, by the amount of shit fox is getting about this i doubt the suicide was aired intentionally

It's impossible to say definitively one way or the other, but unless this whole thing turns out to have been caused by a failure of technology I feel justified in thinking that someone at Fox probably chose not to cut away. Either way, they're still probably going to spend time in the coming days and weeks doing stories about this guy and his death because of the influx of people who will be watching after this. The commercialization of sensationalism is pretty commonplace but commodifying a story about someone's private tragedy like this, which has so little relevance to anyone, is gross to me.

the people that leaped out of the two towers have been commercialized for over a decade now, and it still sickens me.