"When What's Just in Just Isn't News"

Read the full article by Tom Guisto in The Washington Post of November 9, 2006.

The core function that TV news performs very well
is that when there is no news
we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.

David Brinkley, former news anchorman
Excerpt:

The music stopped, the station's logo faded and one of the co-anchors came into focus.

"This just in from Los Angeles," he began, with a somber expression on his face.

Then a picture of Paris Hilton appeared above his left shoulder.

The news anchor informed us that Paris Hilton had been arrested early that morning on a DUI charge. He also reported that Ms. Hilton was briefly handcuffed. The anchor solemnly promised we would be kept informed as the latest news on the arrest came in.

I started to laugh, as did several of the other early birds. But the significance of the report soon turned my thoughts to a sober realization: someone, probably the morning news show's producer, considered Ms. Hilton's arrest a highly newsworthy event. Is Paris Hilton being arrested really worth a "Breaking News"

After reading this I wanted to blog on the value of knowledge. Clearly the news bulletin provided information, and some people learned something about Ms. Hilton. The news editor thought, correctly I suppose, that the audience would value the knowledge gained sufficiently that it was worth broadcasting. In the U.S., TV channels are profit making entities, and the news editor must have made the judgment that broadcasting Ms. Hilton's difficulties would make the station more money in the long run than broadcasting the other information that was at hand. Thus the value that the viewers placed on the information served to set the value that the media placed upon it. I must admit that I fail to understand why anyone would care to know about Ms. Hilton's arrest other than her immediate family, and I suppose that is a very small part of the audience.

There is of course a literature on the value of information. It tends to focus on the economic benefits that result from more informed decisions. The media, however, it more interested in the willingness of people to tune into the medium and the consequent willingness of advertisers to fund that medium. There would seem to be a real disconnect here.

I suggest that the popular audience -- in the United States at least -- is very incompetent in assigning value to information that they receive via the media. They fail to tune into the sources that would help them make better decisions, and tune into sources that bring them highly inaccurate, redundant, or useless information instead. There is an opportunity cost to watching junk, and perhaps a real cost if they buy the products advertised in conjunction with the junk they watch.

The poor news judgment of their readers is probably why the newspapers print so little of the important news -- it is not valued by their readership. That is also probably why The Daily Show can provide as much news content in its comedy format as the nightly news broadcasts on the major networks do in their more serious format.

It may be that our evolution has predisposed us to be interested in the inconsequential. Or that we evolved in situations where the misbehavior of a member the group was of critical importance, and we inappropriately behave as if the media celebrities are members of our group. It may be that our schools and parents don't do a good job in teaching us how to distinguish important from unimportant information. It may be that popular culture encourages us toward the meretricious and away from the meritorious. Probably a little of each!