Death is photogenic

A few nights ago, I watched Natural Born Killers on HBO for the first time. I know, I'm really behind on my movies; Hollywood cinema doesn't really inspire me, and I think they deaden their viewers with many of their movies (I have the displeasure of knowing some people who think Master of Disguise was a thoroughly entertaining, stimulating and appropriate movie, but that's an extreme instance,) so I stick to foreign films or indies whenever I can. Anyway, I was watching NBK, and I was wondering: In today's age of reality-tv, would the media have denegrated to the point where viewers would be watching a live prison riot on tv, with executions and tortures, all in the name of ratings? I remember a short that was set in the near future, and a killer on death row is released into the desert near his prison, to be pursued by the heavily-armed parents of a woman he killed, as an audience roars and calls in from home. I'm sure that was a send-up to Texas. The reason I bring up this point is because of the overwhelming excitement over the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein. I am completely against Saddam Hussein and everything his family and politics stand for, but doesn't celebrating their deaths show the world that the States are willing to stoop down to killing people in order to justify their position? I can understand that the deaths are needed to prove to Iraq that the Hussein rule is now over, and to show the world that the US objectives, other than invading Iraq, is to show that they are attempting to install democracy by removing traces of the previous leadership. Why invasion and conquering is neccessary to establish a democracy strikes me as a direct contradiction, but that is another story. But, having a hour-long special on ABC about how good it is for those men to be dead? I feel that it was crossing the line a bit. The media has shown signs that they are reverting to yellow journalism, and in some cases, extremely bad gonzo journalism. One day, things will end the way it did in NBK: the authority loses their minds and become devoured by the subjects, and the media becomes the news, in the most fatal sense of the word.[add] A CNN.com article discussing release of death-images of Hussein sons; also contains a link to the images themselves.