Shock value rules now. It is a cancerous little attitude that we learned from the media, both the tabloid and the less tabloid. If it doesn't shock, it doesn't sell. Some day, when you are home sick, watch Jerry Springer or Sally Jesse Raphael. No truth is off limits.
People love it.
The audience goes wild when some poor sap suffers through some horribly awkward and embarrassing situation. When an issue comes down to society's need to know versus privacy rights of the individual, the judicial world divides the world into public and private figures. As we have learned ad nauseum from Bob Packwood and Bill Clinton, public figures are fair game for anything. The problem with this argument is that the distinction between public and private is dubious at best. What is newsworthy depends on how one defines his community.