Private Mourning Trumps Public Affair

I saw a news item in our Memphis Commercial Appeal today, dateline Hailey, ID, which happens to be my hometown. I don’t know the people mentioned in the little article - after all, it has been a decade or two since I visited Hailey - but the subject of the article sparked a line of thought that I have followed on occasion. A family (I won’t state their name out of respect for their wishes) requested privacy from newshounds and sensation seekers as they deal with the heart-jolting notice of the capture of their son, an Army private in Afghanistan. Citizens of Hailey, desiring to show commiseration in some way, and I think fittingly, decorated the trees on Main Street with yellow ribbons.
My question: how is it that private mourning becomes a public affair? In fact, how is it that private feelings of any kind are deemed by “investigative reporters” as justifiable to expose to others, whose lives in general do not at the time follow some parallel track and who therefore have no business to know, nor need to be informed of such individual matters of the heart?
There is, on the one hand, the assault on the sufferer, who hardly knows how to process what is happening to himself, let alone the value or appropriateness of sharing that process with people with whom he is not acquainted. Any such intrusion compounds the difficulty of processing the traumatic events in his life in a way that eventually brings meaning and understanding, which are so necessary in being able to continue living an altered life.
On the other hand, there is the casual observer, the reader of the paper or the television spectator, who has just enough on his own plate to manage, and who is invited through this unwarranted introduction into someone else’s experiences, to be distracted from his own affairs, and perhaps to neglect them in favor of attending to someone else’s, and therefore less personally demanding, issues.
There is as well the enticement to the innate desire in everyone for attention; but attention in this manner, whether the giving or the receiving of it, is of no healthy nature and only serves to retard, rather than to encourage, personal fulfillment; and personal fulfillment, after all, is at the base of the desire for attention.
In short: this effort to go after private feeling for public entertainment is a lose-lose proposition. Those who report the news - or who bring us "reality" shows - ought to have the personal honesty to see and to understand that, and to exercise the courage, therefore, of walking away from an “easy” story, or from easy money.