In situations like these, people often run to the "humor helps people cope with death" excuse. Except in these situations, nobody involved is actually doing an

In situations like these, people often run to the "humor helps people cope with death" excuse. Except in these situations, nobody involved is actually doing any coping, because they never had a relationship with the deceased, not even of the Princess Di sort where the relationship is one-way. Nor is the turn to humor nearly this quick among those who are genuinely coping. Instead, these situations are almost always instances of the peanut gallery instinct run amok. We've come to naturally jeer a lot of the things we see on television (which is why MST3K was a success), and it doesn't take much to go from jeering a bad TV show to jeering the content of the news. Hence, we get the Darwin Awards, which nobody in their right mind could mistake as a coping measure. Instead, it's the death of real people used for our entertainment. I strongly recommend reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business to get a handle on how warped our sense of reality has become in the age of television. I'm not about to persecute tdavis for his original comment, but I also think a lot of the counter-reaction here oversteps the mark. If one is going to react to events like these at all, so soon after the event itself, they should do so with a measure of respect. Tragic events like death are considered tragic for a reason, and any attempt to sidestep that fact makes us a little less human. We've seen what happened to Rome, after all. The apology was appropriate, and that's about all that needs to be said.