The problem is the community can't really do anything about it. Without the ability to downvote a topic all you can do is watch and hope others don't upvote a story like that.

Which itself is a problem because the threshold is so low. By even the most conservative estimates there are thousands of people visiting the site every day yet it only takes a handful or so to get an item to the front page.

So even if 99.5% of the people here make a "strong commitment" as you put it the front page will still be flooded with all those TSA stories