Media Corporations Profit from Violence Whether it's a body found along the road, a school shooting, or planes flying into the World Trade Center, the images will be played over and over again in the nausea television commercial.. The most horrific acts can possibly be chronicled in books and films. Packaging and selling the violence of the moment belongs to television - and television will continue to remind us of this. Special custom-made armor covered his body from neck to toe. As the black-clad gunman wandered the street, randomly firing a high-powered semi-automatic rifle at Los Angeles police, a city sat transfixed in front of televisions, mesmerized by the unreal events unfolding outside their doors. When the Los Angeles police realized that the gunman was covered in a bulletproof vest, a call to aim for the head was shouted over their two-way radios. The camera was in the perfect position to capture the shot. The black-clad bank robber who was shooting at will suddenly pulled back, causing a red jet to explode from his head. His legs gave out beneath him. His hands dropped the gun, but he was dead before they could reach the enormous wound. He never felt like he had touched the ground. Moments later, the television helicopter landed and began interviewing eyewitnesses. A middle-aged woman looked straight into the camera and said deadpan, "Things like that just don't happen in America." In Amusing Ourselves To Death, Neil Postman states that "...The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools of conversation." If this is true, then the medium of conversation in America is television. In American homes there are more televisions than houses, and these sets are on for an average of six hours a day, with the average of p... half the paper... of everything becoming the death of the next door neighbor. I've got the bleach blonde with the hot hair who comes in at five and can tell you about the plane crash with a twinkle in her eye. It's interesting when people kill dirty laundryDon HenleyWorks Cited1. Operation Desert Storm: Total Disinformation Program, David Fingrut2. Amusing ourselves to death, Neil Postman, Penguin Books, 1985, p. 83. Electronic Heroin, Jay Hanson4. This statistic comes from the United Nations radio program Perspective (No. 96/52). The program was a report on the 1996 World Television Forum sponsored by the United Nations.5. Millions of viewers tuned in, but the total will never be known, Mike McDaniel, Houston Chronicle, 4/10/95.6. Criminals on the Air: Does GE's Ownership of NBC Violate the Law? , Sam Husseini, EXTRA!, 11/12/94