Are Media just Promoting Murder?

A few hours ago, after my shower, I went outside and got the newspaper. I sat down with my breakfast and the newspaper like I do every single day. But today was a little different, turning the first pages was like an experience in murder. It might be like that every day as well, but today I noticed how many newsworthy articles that was in the first pages of the newspaper regarding murder.It was all over the news, various murders from different countries. Murder doesn´t happen that often in Norway, but it seems to be happening more and more during the past years. And I am not sure, but this summer has been something out of the ordinary. I am not going to be writing about statistics here, this is all just a feeling that I am having. Why are media writing about murder in such a massive scale? It seems like every other article is about death and murder. It´s not hard to find a murder to write about, because it happens every single day somewhere in the world. If the journalist just look hard enough, he or she will find one. And behind every murder there is a story, no doubt about that. The only reason I can think of for writing about murder, is that murder sells, people want to read about murder, they are terrified by it and they are terrified of murders. Newspapers and TV channels are promoting what they think sells, because they are (at least many of them are) here to sell the news and earn money while doing it. Why do we need to read (and watch) stories like this? Is it newsworthy, is it to scare us from doing it, is it information about how some people in our society are or are there another reason for why we all need a story about this? Think about this for a second. What if never got all the stories about the high school masacre at Columbine, would the Virginia Tech masacre have happened? We will never know the answer... Are media really just promoting murder, or are they telling us stories that we all need (want) to hear? What could the alternative be? Maybe media just publishing the statistics of the amounts of murder each month or year, without any details attached to them or any story behind them.