To blame the media for this horror...

[PorkPieLove]

A group of secondary school children came across a dead body lying face up in a stream as they walked home from school. The middle aged man had died from head injuries and the kids saw him as they crossed a footbridge over the stream.

Did they call the police? No...they threw stones and took pictures and videos...which were then uploaded on to the net.

I think the media are partly to blame (and violent computer games) because kids are impervious to the shock of seeing something so dreadful. I've seen images of dead bodies on newspaper websites...and of people buried up to their waist getting stoned....isn't it time the media began to taake their role more responsibly?

Or is it just that the kids responded in a weird way due to shock?

Yes i would! and comparing a phobia to empathy is redundant! And the simple fact someone would watch these images shows a lack of empathy and respect. That is someones mother, father, sister or brother! and watching is taking part in ridicule on its own!

so why do we have certification on films? if images have no effect on people?

I'm not saying images have no effect, I'm saying they don't have enough effect to counter good parenting and other external influences. Certification on films is generally based on imitation.
From the BBFC site: 'Dangerous behaviour (for example, hanging, suicide and self-harming) should not dwell on detail which could be copied. Easily accessible weapons should not be glamorised.' For a 15 film.

That was an extreme example, what about another one. I don't much like watching scenes of surgery or autopsy or anything, but I have a friend who isn't bothered by it. She has no less empathy than me, it just... doesn't bother her.

What the bloody hell have "the media" (a pointless catch-all term at the best of times) got to do wit hit. Kids have acted like animals since time immemorial. With little experience to process such a thing it doean't seem that out of the ordinary to me.

The whole "but they recorded it on their phones" argument is an utterly bogus one: kids haven't had camera phones before, nor any access to passing stuff on to their peers beyond gossip and telling tall tales and, guess what? They've been doing that since kids were kids.

why blame violent computer games? I have played my fair share of them and I am completely normal. I also love watching violent films and horror films, doesn't mean I am going to turn into a psycho. Some people are just bad and it isn't media, games or films that turn them like this

Oh this is a hysterical non-story. The 'ARGH THEY USED THEIR CAMERA PHONES' is just the Mail's continuing flap about modern technology. Kids often have a ghoulish fascination with death predominantly because, when you're a kid, death is something that happens to other people, not you, so it's not something you take seriously.
Tabloid newspapers love to blame the other media, never taking into account the fact that their tendency to label whole categories of people 'other' and less than human might actually have more of an effect than a few horror films and computer games.

Stand by me is the story of a group of kids taking a ghoulish trek to find a dead body.
Kids are ghoulish when it is in the abstract, when they do not feel dircectly affected.

DS1 was talkingthis morning about his charity day being in aid of a school friend who died last year.
The boys remain highly affected by losing him. But someone they don't know, they may be curious or ghoulish about it. People are - rubber neckers are usually adults as were the people I witnessed watching a man burn to death in a fire ib the city.

It isn't a teenager thing . The filming is the natural extention of the factthat we seem unable to experience events without filming them and this generation have mobile phones so do it unashamedly.
I think it is an exageration of normal ghoulish behaviour the inverse of which is the hysterical grief that now seems accepted behaviour. The hoards wailing over Princess Diana would now have their facebook pages to feed their fun.

The story is less about lack of teenage empathy than total lack of courtesy or respect. But lack of respect for anything that does not directly affect them is encouraged everywhere - including on MN - so we/society is more at fault than those teenagers

WTF has media got to do with it? What a knee-jerk, hysterical, non-sensical OP.

This is about a very few teenagers with very bad role models.

(And what SGB and Heracles said about technology and media)

When I was a teenager some kids walking home from my school found a dead body in a car he had parked down a lane and shot himself in the head with a shotgun (not pretty!) the first kids to find the body were horribly traumatised and did call the police. However subsequent kids arrived on the scene before the cops and were not affected more morbidly curious because they had prior warning of what they were going to see. I'm sure the sensational reporting of this incident didn't take into account that many of those teenagers when away from their peers may have been a little traumatised by events. People (grown professional adults)filmed events at 9/11 and the July Tube bombings why should we expect our teenagers to act differently.

The School's version of the story (not reported in the DM) is "On Monday, when some of the students were just walking out the school gates, one of our Year 8 students actually saw what she thought was a body," he said.

"She called her friends back and confirmed it was actually a body and ran straight back into school to find a teacher and tell them.

"By the time she got back out, another teacher and a large group of students had gathered around the site and somebody had rung the emergency services."

i.e. the first pupils to find the body did notify an authority figure, and the emergency services were called almost immediately.

And school and police have said that one pupil had taken a picture on his phone (which he'd deleted before anyone spoke to him about it) and they suspect others may have done and would like them to come forward if so as will be of help to the police.

Not quite the same picture as painted by the Daily Mail.

FFS of course yabu. If it did happen, and it's looking increasingly different to the story you first presented, how in the fuck would it be the medias fault. The kids were (allegedly) throwing stones not the fucking media.

There is also the fact that people may wish to take pictures or record an event because they are aware that important events are documented by, er, the news media, and think that taking pictures may be useful (or lucrative - the papers and the TV news often use images recorded by members of the public who happened to be there in time to take the picture ie of a dramatic event.)
The idea of 'bearing witness' to something isn't necessarily a malevolent one.

Not all teenagers are the same.

I suggest that you stop looking at horrific things on the internet as it appears to be colouring your view of reality (i.e. that all people watch this stuff and that everyone is affected by it in the same way).

It is the DM, they make stuff up to make entertaining reading. I simply don't believe anything they write.