Don't blame the messenger; blame the audience

An Associated Press story today quotes USC "media analyst" and associate communications dean Marty Kaplan as saying (and I'm paraphrasing here) that news media would not have to take ghoulish photos such as the late Olive Osmond in her coffin if the public didn't desire such photos. The passage reads:

Media analyst Marty Kaplan, associate dean at the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Southern California, said similar photographs of celebrities or members of their families can fetch as much as $60,000, "depending on shock value and scarcity."
The audience's appetite "for something so ghoulish" makes such photos profitable, Kaplan said of the images that usually wind up either in tabloid newspapers or on the Internet.
"If we didn't have an appetite for that kind of thing, then there'd be no reason to put a bounty on it," he said.

Kaplan's reasoning is a common response of journalists, but it's overly simplistic in its resolution of an important debate about whether journalists should give the public what it wants (or at least what the journalists think the public wants) or what it needs.
The bounty on a coffin photo of Olive Osmond was first covered yesterday in the Deseret Morning News by Sharon Haddock in this story.