(5:15)

     All 24hour cable TV newsmakers eagerly provide prurient Money Shots because these proffer the most lucrative and seductive banality possible during around-the-clock production.  Every technology available is employed to advance this premise because somewhere inside most every LIVE event lurks the prospect of “snuff-sex”.  And for “live” newscasting, the erotic agony of death always supersedes death itself.

     Indeed, the Money Shot is a key to profit because it maximizes and extends viewer arousal.  During the best of situations, very little production expense is necessary to produce a mesmerotic Money Shot.  Indeed, as we find here, just add flirtatious narration over most any unfolding LIVE action... and Voilà.  It is the best and cheapest tactic for guaranteeing ratings. 

    Money Shots within snuff-sex-newscasting are the best kind of TV content because each titillates its audience ad infinitum, making it almost impossible for us to stop watching.  Each conflates every forbidden death desire with every forbidden voyeuristic eroticism.  To help signal each eroticism, FOX News’ designers make sure to brand their screens with the word “URGENT”, announcing in no uncertain terms that we are presently floating in priceless liminality just prior to emotional ejaculation. 

     Newsmakers and audiences alike understand that when broadcasting snuff-sex, a Money Shot’s promissory implosion a priori to extermination or annihilation creates the erotic pre-lubrication necessary to keep every viewer eyeball glued to the screen.  In a very real sense, TV news is becoming an exercise in auto-erotic asphyxiation.  We love to watch ‘the feeling’, which is simply aura transgressed through an elimination of distance.  Everyone knows this is the cheap good stuff, and so we always demand a lot of it.

     To help clarify this paradoxical news production epistemology, consider that the true sin in recently publishing Kate Middleton’s nipples sprang not from any taboo of seeing her ‘royal bits’, but that the ‘forbidden’ images were so grainy from being photographed from far away with a long-lens camera.  Viewers were left to their own close-up imaginations.  Indeed, with that ‘kat’ now out of the bag, all that remains for public-fantasy are our naughty hopes for ever-higher resolution images of those same princess brown spots.  (After all, the possibility of tricking the duchess again into “URGENT” vaginal photos would be a real long shot, wouldn’t it?)

     Also consider the recent controversial anti-Islam video Innocence of Muslims.  The true production blasphemy, at least in the U.S., is in this video’s shabby writing and production style, which falls flat upon sophisticated North American media eyes and ears.  This clumsy video might eroticize other cultures, but certainly not ours!  To U.S. sensibilities it represents only the wasteful fumbling of a perfectly effective snuff-sex Money Shot.

    Implicit to a Money Shot, tele-genital LIVE-action explicitness must never be allowed to fully conclude on screen, because it is foreplay which relentlessly grabs and holds TV viewers in lubricated mesmerotic paroxysm.  Climax only terminates foreplay and interrupts TV’s most profitable quivering.  For example, with 24hour news, political editorializing always trumps political election in exactly the same way ass-licking always trumps a sperm-facial within other pornographic imaging, because -- although both can easily be produced to shock -- foreplay clearly holds viewer interest easier and longer than any climax.  A good Money Shot keeps making money.

     Here we discover a critical difference between TV news and most other forms of media production.  A climax for most media makers symbolizes “culmination”.  However, a climax for TV news symbolizes “termination”.  Thus a car chase is better snuff-sex news than an execution.  And so, to mishandle a network Money Shot is to badly bungle a core premise of profitability in TV news production: “Keep stroking the lead story.  Keep the viewers in their seats.  Keep the cameras rolling.”  Hegemonically, we demand mesmerotic perfection from our newsmakers.  It is why we so greedy consume the greedy products we so greedily make for our greedy little selves...

     Last week, FOX News employees greedily broadcast yet another promiscuous, in-progress car chase Money Shot.  It is a “greedy” car chase because it is that kind of news which stimulates its audience into non-stop convulsion, into involuntary ripples of private arousal so perfectly suited to every available screen.  But then --uncharacteristically-- the FOX News on-air team screwed it all up.  Their exclusive broadcast came to a breathtaking conclusion and the true Money Shot was suddenly terminated.  They allowed us to see the protagonist shoot himself in the head with his own gun.  We saw it clearly through a local-affiliate helicopter’s surveilling telescopic robo-camera. 

     By NOT cutting away (or more accurately, by cutting off), the Money Shot comes to problematic fruition and our genitalia cease their involuntary contractions...no matter how hard we rub.  Indeed, this perfectly profitable news story ended in a crumpled heap of flaccid apology.  What?  Where were the product placements and the lead-ins to the next mesmerotic spooge-fest?  We simply can’t maintain our voyeuristic erections without continuous dosings of ‘journalistic viagra’... a four hour erection.

    True news making transgression here was not simply that FOX News personnel aired this story to conclusion...but rather that it aired this conclusion.  Doing so interrupted our absorption so abruptly we orgasmed incorrectly, newsmaker and viewer alike.  Good spunk fell to the ground like good seed upon rock.  For the actual Money Shot was in prolonging the eroticized chase scene, not in airing the suicide.  And there lies the true journalistic offense.

     Once this man falls dead to the ground --whether our ejaculates subside or disperse-- we swiftly drift into sad wisps of directionless melancholy.  Our shudders of eroticism, obsession and dependency, fall silently short, unfulfilled.  And we momentarily awaken...only to find ourselves turning the TV channel in hopes of masturbating to yet another promise of “URGENT” close-up snuff-sex.   And, of course, allowing the viewer any reason to change channels is the most egregious production sin known to 24hour news.

     Shepard Smith’s brief self-interested apology for wasting perfectly good viewer jizm over a botched Money Shot is the least we can expect from FOX newsmakers in this situation, I suppose:

            "And we really messed up.  And we're all very sorry.  That

        didn't belong on TV.  We took every precaution we knew

        how to take to keep that from being on TV.  And I personally

        apologize to you that happened.  Sometimes we see a lot

        of things we don't let get to you because it is not time

        appropriate, it is insensitive, it is just wrong.  And that was

        wrong.  And that won't happen again on my watch.  And I'm

        sorry.  We will update you on what happened with that guy

        and how that went down tonight on the Fox Report. 

        I'm sorry."

But then, why offer an apology at all?  Any offending image will simply be re-shown over and over anyway, right?

     FOX News’ seminal event was barely mentioned by anyone on-air ever again.  Most likely because many more snuff-sex Money Shots are right around the corner from every 24hour news provider.  And we can’t wait to jerk-off to each one.

    “...The most intimate operation of your life becomes the potential grazing ground of media... (while) the entire universe unfolds unnecessarily on your home screen.  This is a microscopic pornography, pornographic because it is forced, exaggerated, just like the close-up of sexual acts in a porno film.  All this destroys the stage, once preserved through a minimal distance and which was based on a secret ritual known only to its actors.  ...Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusion, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication.  We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication.  And ecstasy is obscene.”

        from:  Jean Baudrillard,  The Ecstasy of Communication  1987  p.20-22

     “...At a time when television and the media are increasingly unable to give an account of the world's (unbearable) events, they have discovered daily life and existential banality as the most deadly event, the most violent news, the very scene of the perfect crime.  And indeed it is.  People are fascinated, fascinated and terrified by the indifference of the Nothing-to-say, Nothing-to-do, by the indifference of their very existence.”

       from:  Jean Baudrillard,  The Conspiracy of Art  2005  p.182