As the news reporter spoke, a clip of the accident scene appeared. For several seconds, viewers saw a shot of the victims, their bodies draped with sheets, a crumpled Cadillac nearby. Unfortunately, my mother was watching.

Later in the week I called Mom to ask how she was doing. She hesitated, then admitted that she had recently had a “bad day.” She explained how she had turned on the TV to get the morning news and saw an image that brought back the worst tragedy of her 82 years. She had not seen any pictures of the accident before, but now, she told me, the scene was burned into her brain.

When the accident first occurred, my mother and the rest of our family were too preoccupied to watch the news. When a local paper ran a photo of the incident on its front page, my brother and I intercepted it so Mom wouldn’t see it. Then, when my mother was least prepared for it, a TV station managed to aggravate a wound that shows little sign of healing.

Video clips like the one my mother saw are called “B-roll”–they’re intended to make a report more visually interesting than just a talking head. In the world of local TV news, where substance often takes a back seat to sensationalism, B-roll clips are often of graphic scenes: fires, crashes, sheet-draped bodies. Local TV newscasts have earned such a bad reputation for sensational reporting that an industry catchphrase describes their planning process: if it bleeds, it leads.

That creed appears to be in effect at WPXI. In the 1998 edition of an annual study conducted by Columbia University’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, the station earned an F for newscast quality. The Pittsburgh market as a whole earned the dubious distinction of being the worst of the 20 markets studied.

Why is some local TV news failing? Because its priorities center on making money, not informing the public. It’s simple: they believe blood sells. Viewers’ morbid curiosity draws them in, and sensational reporting and graphic images keep them there. A 1998 study by Rocky Mountain Media Watch found that more than 40 percent of local TV newscasts was devoted to coverage of crimes, accidents and other violent events.

But what effect does a diet of bloody news have on a society? We become calloused and paranoid at the same time, hardened to violence but fearful that we might be next. And because TV news only glosses over issues of real importance, the more we watch, the less well informed we become.

It doesn’t have to be this way. When I called WPXI to complain about the grisly footage it had shown, I was told that the station had simply been trying to illustrate the safety issues the newscaster was talking about. I argued that if the station believed a visual was essential to the story, it could have done what another local station did: it could have used a long shot of the ambulances with their flashing lights, minus the victims’ bodies.

Research indicates that stations that take the high road may be rewarded in the long run. Columbia University’s annual studies consistently show that stations with high-quality newscasts build ratings more effectively than lower-scoring ones. It turns out that quality sells. We’re smarter than news producers think we are–and the world is a better place than they portray.

What WPXI did is far from unusual, and TV news isn’t the only guilty party. I’ve viewed–yes, with morbid curiosity–photos of plane crashes and accident scenes in newspapers and magazines. And while it might have occurred to me that the victims’ loved ones would be pained by seeing these images, I’d have defended the news outlets’ right to publish them.

And I still would. But I would also ask those news outlets to ask themselves two questions before publishing or broadcasting explicit images: is it news, and is it necessary?

You could argue that the scenes of my sister’s death were news when they occurred in March. But they weren’t news in late August. When WPXI broadcast those scenes in its most recent report, it was just scraping the bottom and feeding every negative stereotype about local TV news. My sister’s sheet-draped body is no longer news, and by showing an image of it, WPXI didn’t serve its viewers or its bottom line. It simply made a grieving mother cry.