News vs. Entertainment

I woke up this morning to headline news about an airplane crash in some distant part of the world (I do not remember where).

The thing is, airplane crashes are not news.

Airplane crashes are entertainment.

The difference between news and entertainment is that news is useful. News tells you something that will affect your life (or, at least, the lives of a lot of people in the circulation area). News concerns things like legislation winding its way through the hill, important information about the nominated Attorney General, international tensions that might erupt into war, international negotiations, medical breakthroughs, technological innovations.

If we are not reading an article because of its usefulness, then we must be reading it because of its entertainment value.

Of course, the reason that entertainment replaces news is because readers are buying entertainment, but they do not buy news. The appearance of headlines such as this is symptomatic of the fact that people will turn away from the media that offers news and pick up entertainment in its place.

"News" does not exist because it doesn't have a market.

I think that one of the reasons that Karl Rove was so successful engineering so much evil in the world is because the evil he engineered counted as "News", and as such it simply does not matter to the public as much "entertainment".