FOXnews.com even has the word “Pop-tarts” on their frontpage as they cover these people. I agree, it gets old and annoying when I think there is more important news out there not being reported.

But, those people are a part of our culture. In some case, those people are more recognizable than the President. They are definitely more recognizable than political leaders around the world, including at our federal level.

FOX, CNN, and other news networks wouldn’t cover these stories if it didn’t make them money. For instance, local news on the west coast frequently covers live car chases. Why? Because people like watching them (especially from a helicopter perspective - that’s novel). The ratings for these car chases are really high. (BTW: people enjoy watching the live chase scenes because they want to see a disastrous crash or a perpetrator being taken down in a violent way). But what value does covering a car chase add to the wide viewing area?

I’ve heard from someone that works in the news industry that the news is about “entertainment”. Not the “entertainment industry”, but about throwing something tasty in front of the viewer/reader. You basically want them to look at the TV for as long as possible, regardless of what you show on it.

What other news websites are you going to use?

What you want is a news website that allows you to select the topics you do and do not want to read about. Maybe hit up: http://www.breitbart.com/, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/, or http://drudgereport.com ?

I agree totally. It is unbelievable that there are more positive role moldels out there for our teens to look at. Maybe that is not sensational enough. Embarking on the entertainment industry myself, I can already list a huge list of people who are news worthy for the wonderful things they have done. Real people that work hard, learn, study, and live their craft. To top it all off, they really care about people because they are real people. Why can’t the entertainment news be filled with enteraining people doing great things.

Yup. The news has been profoundly changed when it has to compete with MTV. In order for people to watch it, it has to cater to the same attention span. IMHO, this is a limitation of television, as a medium.

The way I keep up with most of the news is that I have a subscription to Commentary. It’s a little too neocon-ish for me, honestly, but I have been unsuccessful in finding magazines that write to this level (i.e., it’s all big long essays and no pictures) that come from a non-neocon perspective, if that makes any sense. It’s a bit different target audience than, say, People.

If anyone has any other recommendations for these sort of news/political journals that are written from somewhere else on the political spectrum, lemme know. As much as I can, I don’t like to read stuff on a computer.

- garrett (golfsierra.org/blog)

Well, to be honest I’m not sure that TV was ever a good medium for news. It’s more like, for a few decades it was the most real-time mass communication medium, and people do like visuals with their news so they preferred it to radio.

I don’t get news from TV. Occasionally I get some breaking news on the radio. Mostly I read current events on blogs. Not to poo-poo your post but just to make a point – I really couldn’t care less what’s on Fox News or CNN, except for the influence they wield on the public.

Getting news from TV seems as anachronistic as getting sports scores from the newspaper, or going to the record store to see what’s new. I realize that because of the Digital Divide and intergenerational Angst, this isn’t true of everyone.

Philip’s tunnel to nowhere: blog.godblessthefreaks.org