It is a world of gaudy, sometimes gratuitous detail.
The murder of Banaz Mahmod was reported in frankly gratuitous detail, and in a way that related the attack to her culture while providing minimal context.
"And then it got even worse," Biscuit confides about sneaking a look at the photographs the killer took of his victims while they were being tortured — which he then goes on to describe in unnervingly gratuitous detail.
He criticized what he described as gratuitous detail about Mr. Mandela's liver and kidney functions in the report, and said it appeared aimed at discrediting the country's leadership.
Her feel for the social landscape of the New South -- the book takes place sometime in the 1970's, though Tartt is blessedly sparing with gratuitous period details and pop-cultural references -- is remarkably acute.
By filling his report with gratuitous, X-rated details about Clinton's intimate moments with Lewinsky, Starr appears to be following the same strategy as Jones's lawyers: shore up a questionable legal case with reams of graphic sexual material.
Such a macabre level of detail might seem gratuitous in less erudite hands, but Doughty brings a lightness of touch to the text: on rearranging the bodies to access the first in line for cremation, she observes: "That meant stacking and restacking the cardboard boxes like a game of body-fridge Tetris".
And, as in that show, plotlines are ingeniously interwoven, and no detail or joke is gratuitous: everything, from the songs by Chicago to the name of Will's child (Howard, after Howard Roark in the Ayn Rand novel "The Fountainhead"), has a sly comic purpose that is revealed at the end.
You say responsible media outlets do not show gratuitous images of dead bodies or run lurid details of sexual assaults.
