Media and Sensationalism

In my Contemporary Israeli Fiction class (for which I have a midterm on Monday), we saw how Israeli writers such as Castel Bloom or Yehoshua denounce the way media coverage of events such as bombing and war. We spoke a lot in class about media sensationalism and about the appropriate coverage for such events. It is one thing to deliver sensationalism with news of presidents cheating on their wives, but it is probably another to use tragic events for a commercial purpose. Besides the issue of compassion, it demeans the definition of media and demeans the trust that its customers have in it.