It's probably not a good idea to hypothesize about attacks on individuals; you might want to rewrite your post. Of course TV stations want incoming footage to meet broadcast quality standards - having worked in narrative film for a while I fully agree that better is better because while you can go down in quality for lower bandwidth it's basically impossible to go back up again.

On the other hand if the footage is coming from an actual war zone such as Aleppo or the future smoking ruins of Atlanta then news organizations will take whatever they can get. Absent a perfect reliable solution for moving such data around in dreadful conditions everyone is just gonna have to compromise - half a loaf is better than no bread.