Before any of you BUGgers complain, the compilers of this column and its junior sibling Mediocre Bytes have always called vision shown on news platforms of world incidents where the tragic loss of human life has been substantial as disaster porn. 

And, NO, we didn’t think that up so we could put it in headings like the one above to shamelessly try to boost our pathetic readership. Okay, maybe just a bit.

But we’ve always liked the phrase because top porn is characterised by what’s known as the money shot that normally cums at the end of such offerings.

But not always and that’s exactly the same with disaster porn on electronic mediocre news platforms. Networks can vary widely on whether they show the exact moment, say, when two aircraft collide and a helluva lot of people have been killed instantly or if they are patient, not too soon after. The money shot!

An example was the military helicopter/passenger jet  collision over Washington DC where vision was repeatedly cut short moments before impact. Ditto for the two choppers that came together at SeaWorld on the Gold Coast. 

Viewers were spared the money shot over the Potomac River that killed more than a hundred souls. Ditto for the Gold Coast tourist flights that claimed four lives.

What were those news executives protecting their Australian audiences from? MGH is pretty confident that no body parts were immediately ejected clear of these four aircraft during the money shot so viewers would not have been subjected to arm parts waving a sad final goodbye.

But it happens regularly. An airshow machine not shown at the moment of an unscheduled contact with the ground. Vision of a supposedly off-course drone cut short just before it hits a beach resort, killing kids playing on the sand.

So we come to this column’s debatable point; why over the past four days have we been bombarded with horrific vision of truly-cock-hard money shots of many, many, innocent people at the moment they are killed at that border crossing between Nepal and China. Those were not ants being shown running in fear as a deadly flash flood many metres deep of water, large rocks and mud carried them away. None would have survived. Same for those poor souls desperately trying not to be sucked into the torrent and yet got clobbered by a falling building anyway.

Don’t get us wrong at the MGH. Most of its compilers favour the inclusion of the money shot in almost all circumstances. One of our chaps over the years has filmed his own money shots many, many, times.

But maybe one of our compilers hit the problem on the head with a simplistic explanation. “Those who died in Washington DC and on the Gold Coast were probably mostly white and reasonably well-to-do so their sad and sudden deaths had to be treated with greater care and sensitivity.”

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