Re:
"Why take chances on alienating any part of your audience"
This is a
good question and it relates to models of society and the order of priorities in those different models.
In societies which enshrine libertarian consumption (like the UK and the USA) then the customer (and often the individual citizen) is left to their own devices and is
"always right" (in theory, if not always in practice) and is generally held to be the self-determining arbiter of their own affairs.
In other models, such as a social market economy like Germany, where I lived in my early twenties for a brief time, there is a concept called
Zivilcourage (or
civic courage) where as pro-active members of society, individuals are entitled to guide other members of society in doing
the right thing for themselves, for others and for society generally.
Consequently an individual attempting to jaywalk may be chided by another who asks them what kind of example it sets for children who might not know better; or else an individual acting anti-socially (by, for instance, playing their own music too loudly) on a metropolitan light railway (be it BART, Subway, tube or U-Bahn) may be interrupted and asked to maybe think about acting a little less anti-socially.
You can favour that model or the Anglo-American model of civic interaction (or indeed any other model) and very probably, as in all things, there is a balance to be struck, but, in essence, the answer to the question:
"Why take chances on alienating any part of your audience"
is:
"Why take chances on any part of your audience alienating any other part of your audience?"
And, yes, I recognise that in a more individualistic society, the answer to the last question is:
"Whether they do or don't, it's not my problem."
But that's just the point - in a society which prizes consensus-based societal interaction (and, by extension,
civic courage), it
is your problem.
