As the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev unwound last Friday, one of the most common anxious jokes I heard was that when it was all over over, Ben Affleck, who grew up in the Boston area and made his bones with movies like Good Will Hunting, Gone Baby Gone, and The Town was going to walk away with an armload of Academy Awards for whatever movie he inevitably makes about the Boston Marathon bombing—and bombers. Over at the Hollywood Reporter, Eriq Gardner explain that it’s possible that Tsarnaev, who is recovering from serious injuries and has been indicted on charges of weapons of mass destruction use and malicious damage of property resulting in death, could try to hire an entertainment lawyer to negotiate the sale of his life rights, or to block a movie about him altogether:

Massachusetts is among many states these days that has a “right of publicity” law. This statute prevents unauthorized commercial use of an individual’s “name, portrait or picture.” Further, the law is described as similar to one enacted in New York, which is important because in a rather unprecedented move a few weeks ago, a New York judge temporarily blocked Lifetime Television from airing a movie about convicted killer Chris Porco after the subject sued. But the judge’s restraining order was stayed after Lifetime cried about the potential disaster to free speech.

For that reason, it’s almost guaranteed — although not totally because Massachusetts has no appellate case law on the topic — that Tsarnaev wouldn’t be able to stop any production company from making a movie about his life.

He makes clear that it would be hard for Tsarnaev to block a project entirely, or to guarantee that he got paid: courts have tended to side with filmmakers on free speech grounds, though some criminals and accused criminals have won the right to some compensation from projects that retell their stories. But the entire scenario raises uncomfortable questions about what it takes to lock down the rights to a good story in Hollywood. Would someone decide it’s worth it, even if it meant paying someone who is accused of killing and maiming dozens of people? And would they pay up if the money had to go to a compensation fund rather than to Tsarnaev himself, an arrangement that would be the equivalent of paying bombing survivors for their injuries, especially given the steep medical costs many of them are facing, and the fact that donations may not be enough to cover all of their needs? I hate the idea of seeing Tsarnaev get paid for the harm he’s caused the Boston area over the past two weeks. But as a moral exercise, I’m grimly curious what kind of price Hollywood would put on his story.

In 1993, 42.4 million households tuned in to the series finale of Cheers. Last Friday, almost 42 million people tuned in ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel or MSNBC to watch the last hour of the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old who today was charged with using a weapon of mass destruction and malicious destruction of property resulting in death in the bombings a week ago of the Boston Marathon. There’s no question that a national news event, particularly one centered on a spectacular and seemingly inexplicable crime, would draw an enormous audience. But the juxtaposition of those figures from twenty years apart serves to illustrate a useful point: national tragedies, particularly crime stories, are perhaps the last form of television that has a truly mass audience.

The extent to which the American television audience has fragmented is extraordinary, and not entirely a bad thing, driven as it has been by dramatic increases in the numer of offerings available to viewers, and a dramatic increase in their quality. In the 1952-1953 second season of I Love Lucy, for example, the show averaged a 67.3 rating, meaning 67.3 percent of American television households were tuned into the show during its time slot. It’s hard to come up with a directly comparable number for Friday night’s news coverage because ratings are done by show rather than in the aggregate, but if 42 million households tuned in to watch the manhunt, that would represent 36.8 percent of America’s 114.2 million television households. Similarly, n Cheers’ fifth season, its highest-rated, the show, which aired from 1986-1987, pulled in an average rating of 27.2, which averaged out to 23.77 million viewers per episode. Friends pulled in an average of 24.50 million viewers per episode in its eighth season, which aired in 2001-2002. But the last year a show that won the Nielsen ratings had a rating of above 20 was 1997-1998, when Seinfeld pulled in a 21.7 rating. In 2011-2012, NBC Sunday Night Football pulled in the crown with a mere 12.9 rating.

I’m not sad that we have so much tremendous television on the airwaves these days, and that people have so many options for terrific viewing that are specific to their interests. But I am sorry that there’s nothing narrative that unites us as much as television viewers as a manhunt like this did. The reasons we tune into events like the chase after Tsarnaev are clear. The crimes he is accused of committing are real, rather than fictional, which raises the stakes on our desire for resolution and closure. The events are unscripted—unlike crime shows, where familiar detectives have a particular knack of ending standoffs, real life encounters between criminals and the police are far more volatile. And this is programming with great potential for further violence that could be aired live. Particularly given the recent death of fugitive former Los Angeles Police Department officer Christopher Dorner in a standoff with police at a remote cabin, and the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar’s brother, in a fight with police earlier in the day, the chase for Tsarnaev seemed like it could easily have ended in a bombing or a shootout, rather than with the surrender that eventually took place.

It’s fear and morbid curiosity—neither of which are unjustified emotions—that draw us to this kind of chase. In the past it was possible to create enormous audiences through compelling characters and long-established relationships. Now, that seems impossible, and the reactions that bring us together are darker. That doesn’t mean our responses aren’t genuine or valid. But it’s a shame that we’re sharing collective terror and anxiety on a greater scale than we’re sharing joy, transport, and simple humor.

The rush to be the first outlet to break all sorts of news in the wake of the Monday bombing of the Boston Marathon that killed three people and left many others gravely injured has done all sorts of damage to both individuals’ reputations and to our larger community this week. The New York Post reported that a man of Saudi origin was being questioned by law enforcement in a Boston hospital in the wake of the bombing—it turned out he was merely a survivor of the attack who had been tackled by a bystander who was suspicious of him for doing the rather sensible thing of running away from a scene of carnage. The Boston Globe and CNN mistakenly reported that a suspect or suspects in the bombing had been arrested, when, as became clear, no such arrests had taken place. The Post subsequently published on its front page a photo of two men at the marathon with the headline “Bag Men,” suggesting they were wanted in the bombing—it emerged that they were Salah Eddin Barhoum and Yassine Zaime, local teenagers who had hoped to run part of the Marathon route in the wake of the officially-registered runners. And social media sites, included Reddit, suggested that missing Brown student Sunil Tripathi was a suspect in the bombing, a misidentification amplified significantly after his name was overheard on a police scanner during the escalated manhunt for the real suspects last night, and one that conservative media sites who seized on his name have been slow to correct.

These are serious errors, and they’ll bring a range of consequences, from lawsuits to loss of reputation, for the outlets that reported them or that doubled down on them, seemingly having abandoned standards of journalism like having two sources to confirm a piece of information. And reporters like Pete Williams of NBC News, who have been judicious and often first to be correct about developments in the investigation, will hopefully be rewarded for their care and reliability. I’m disgusted by the damage that the Post, in particular, has done to the reputations and potential safety of innocent people. And I think that a general rush to claim scoops and exclusives is counterproductive for journalism in general. It’s possible to develop true scoops through deep, proprietary reporting that genuinely reveals new information to the public that other outlets could not offer up because they haven’t done the same research and interviews. But much of the information claimed as proprietary is nothing of the sort: it’s reproductions of official announcements or information that will shortly become widely available. They’re scoops only in the sense that one reporter has a better wifi connection at a press conference than the competition, or that someone is able to type up a headline faster than other people who have received a press release at the same time. Claiming scoops or exclusives under those circumstances is a cheap way to try to burnish a publication’s credibility that actually does the opposite.
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