Should Car Accident Compilations Be Banned?

Trash TV is cheap to make and cheapens its viewers. Reality TV is, oddly enough, the best of all the dross. The Airwaves have been full of bad television since the beginning. Home videos of kids saying daft things, dogs humping furniture and large people breaking deckchairs. Chortle. Considering that real, vapid human beings of no talent and giant ego usually want paying, home video clips are an effective and cheap way to make a show. TV budgets low? Just raid your home movie archives!

Oh fine, this television isn't about to cause the moral disintegration of society as we know it. Without cheaply obtained archive footage, the schedules would simply require more money than the stations have. Home video shows are terrible by design: by saving money in this part of the schedule, money can be reserved for shows you may be around to watch. But sometimes, compilation images come from far more questionable sources. To me, the low point of television is the car accident video compilation show. Whether named 'America's Most Horrific Smashes' or sanitised for inclusion in a cop-footage show, these things are sickening. These kind of shows are always about cheap programming, but don't they cheapen the viewer's life a little too?. But whereas most compilation shows get slack-jawed guffaws, car accidents aren't funny. And frankly, compilation shows that make entertainment from them are extremely creepy.

Fine, I see that destruction is in some way interesting and a matter of human fascination. Yes, I'd even watch a building being demolished. But when cars crash into each other, people are inside them. And most TV-worthy crashes are worth at least a substantial accident claim. Ask yourself next time you see this questionable footage: what were the consequences of these crashes?. In such a crash, surely people would be seriously hurt? There's a very real chance with some of the more spectacular crashes that someone was killed. And who is getting renumeration from the usage of such footage?. If we're lucky, it might be the police? Or perhaps a person with a camera filmed the whole thing unfold, not thinking to help the people involved in the accident occurring before their eyes? The rights to road accident footage aren't awarded when a victim files a RTA claim. With so much moral ambiguity, we should ban these videos from TV, and the Internet too.