The fascination with death.
For centuries people have been fascinated with death with cults and celebrations such as the Day of the Dead in Mexico all surrounding the theme of death. The term 'if it bleeds, it leads' is a phrase related to mass media's focus on death which is a very prevalent part of our society. The most captivating headlines within media are those often surrounding the news of death, murder, mass killings and other gruesome events. Vincent Sacco, a professor of sociology at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, describes how mainstream commercial media in the US changed their editorial processes in the 1970s to focus more on crimes. The 70s, in particular, saw the emergence of renowned serial killers Ted Bundy, BTK, the Zodiac Killer and Charles Manson.
One of the reasons as to why crime reports are common within leading headlines is that investigative journalism is expensive and carries the risk of offending a major advertiser. Reporting a crime committed by an individual with no political or economic power, however, is cheaper and maintains the audience.
'The sense of the morbid is part of the human soul... I believe it belongs to this morbid sphere, the dimension which makes you fee repulsion...whilst being attracted to it at the same time.' (Binik, 2019).
Modern media has had a huge impact on morbid fascination with instances such as the Christchurch shooting and the London Bridge attack, both in 2019, causing a storm in mass media due to the video footage captured of both events. The public's fascination with violence and their intrinsic want to bear witness to the crimes itself is the core reason video footage of such events go viral. (Details of both events can be found in my blog). The video footage from the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand in particular displayed scenes of a very graphic nature by the killer recording his actions live of Facebook for thousands of viewers to see innocent men and women fall to the ground, shot without any mercy. By the time Facebook was able to remove the seventeen-minute video it had been viewed over 4,000 times, and that's without considering other social media platforms such as twitter that the video had been shared to. A shocking aspect to it is that the first report of the video came after 12 minutes of the video having been posted live, thus any individual viewing the footage within those 12 minutes either ignored or chose not to report it. Why would such gruesome content, and very real content go viral? And more importantly, why would someone choose to share such content? This goes beyond our intrinsic morbid fascination into such events.
Binik, O. (2019). The Fascination with Violence in Contemporary Society. Springer Nature.
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