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Old February 3, 2013, 01:24 PM   #5
Aguila Blanca
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Join Date: September 25, 2008
Location: CONUS
Posts: 18,433
It's not just "professional TV audiences" that like blood.

Back in the late 1960s/early 1970s a friend of mine ran a modified stock car at a small, local track on Saturday nights. One week they had a rather spectacular accident in which a car's right front wheel hit the concrete barrier entering turn one just right so the car was launched. It literally flew over the safety fence and came down on its roof in the pits. Miraculously, the driver was only bruised, and nobody in the pits was injured.

The next week the paid attendance was three times that of an average Saturday's gate.

I had a friend (now passed on) who was a newspaper editor in the 1980s. Even then, when the Internet either hadn't yet been invented, or was in its infancy, he regularly bemoaned the need (and he recognized it as a need) to stress bad news over good. We discussed one day the then-recent demise of a short-lived attempt by someone to publish a good news-only newspaper. It didn't last a year. My friend's comment was simply, "Body count sells newspapers."
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