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  Vic, most people deal with tragedy through humour. It isn't sick and twisted, it's normal. Call it a coping mechanism if you like.
  
  I don't find any of the jokes RaoulMoatly funny.
  
  But hey. Getting back to TV reporting, it seems to me that the police efforts are as much triggered by media coverage as public interest. If any of you view various websites that show alternative news then you'll know that this type of situation is far more common that anyone may realize. It's only the ones that attract the attention of mainstream media that tend to get all the big attention and the big screaming fighter jets, all the rest are handled in the normal way by cops just doing their jobs. Yes the police responses were probably OTT but then so was the transformation of this tragic event into a big media event, which it was. This was a coronation of QEII, a Moon landing, a Churchill funeral, a Princess Di funeral. This was a big TV event and nothing more to everyone except those immediately involved.
  
  We may all moralize about the awful media coverage (especially the shameless law-breaking coverage by Sky News) but we loved it. Let's not be shy here. If we were that offended by it we wouldn't have watched it. That murderer would have probably been caught and sentenced but I do believe that the media presence resulted in the added tension that led to him killing himself.
  
  Just like the BBC reporter Robert Peston, who loves reporting bad economic news in over-dramatic style so that we all panic and stop spending, this was a classic example of what is wrong with our current media culture.
  
  We ALL killed that guy. Whether we want to face up to that fact or not is another matter but it was a public execution led by media intrusion.

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