“Life, on January 5, 1948, ran a big picture captioned ‘Ten Seconds Before Death’ (above). A Chicago woman called the press and told them she was going to commit suicide. A photographer rushed to her apartment and snapped her. ‘Just as he took this anguished portrait, she brushed by him, leaped out the third-story window to her death.’

This is merely an extreme instance of what is literally ghoulishness. The ghoul tears and devours human flesh in search of he knows not what. His hunger is not earthly. And a very large section of the ‘human interest’ and ‘true story’ activity of our time wears the face of the ghoul and the vampire. That is probably the meaning of the popular phrases ‘the inside dirt’, the ‘real inside dope’. There is very little stress on understanding as compared with the immediate bang of ‘history in the making’. Get the feel of it. Put that sidewalk microphone right up against the heart of that school kid who is looking at the Empire State Building for the first time.”

- Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951)