While it's just basic parenting to ignore the kid who's been bad and pay attention to the kid who's been wronged, most people are abysmal parents. Not surprisingly they deploy the same erroneous responses in other areas of life. Meanwhile the mass media, which is reliant on continuous sensationalism, panders to this misguided impulse by endlessly reporting the babblings of freaks and morons simply because those babblings are 100% guaranteed to grab eyeballs - that can then be monetized for profit. The media can't change because any change for the better would hurt the bottom line. We are thus the first civilization in history to destroy itself in pursuit of ad revenues. Bathos knows no limits, alas...