Television is the very best at achieving that goal, but the popular print media is no slouch either. Fifty cents for a daily newspaper comes nowhere near being able to pay for writing, editing, printing and distributing their product. As you watch your favorite program, try to actively consider your mind to be a product delivered to the advertisers, and your perspective will change over time. Death and destruction may not be fun, but is a form of macabre entertainment that we as humans just can t seem to turn away from, and the media take serious advantage of that weakness. This is especially true with aviation.
Most people have at least one significant airplane accident imprinted in their memory.
The FAA is in a very difficult position because of the popular media. The media have the power to drive the FAA to actions that may not directly benefit safety but are very reactive to accidents, then they turn around and accuse the FAA of tombstone engineering for behaving in that very fashion. It is not unusual for FAA employees who are working on programs that have strategic safety benefits to be reassigned to emergent, but technically questionable, activities that are driven by the press. Take, for example, the FAA inspectors who were shown on television, visibly kicking airplane tires after the 1996 ValueJet accident in the Florida Everglades. The intent was to reassure the public that the FAA was out there protecting them, but it was likely that those inspectors were taken away from higher level fleet management duties, and the value of inspecting individual airplanes is very low for the small number of FAA inspectors available.