"Desensitization"

I receive MSNBC news headlines via e-mail at work, and I agree 100% with this sentiment by Tom Shales regarding yesterday's New York City plane crash:

"For the rest of the afternoon and evening, the sadness of a pointless tragedy competed with what seemed like an endless stream of tasteless jokes about the Yankees upstaging the Mets again. The entire front page of one paper here showed the Mets under a headline that read, "It's Our Town." But Lidle's catastrophe surely will fill that space on Thursday. You can't record this event without noting its instant "tabloidization" in countless minds. Perhaps, in retrospect, we'll remember Lidle's death as, among other things, a landmark in our progressive desensitization or our inability to distinguish between celebrity news and real life."