Conflating news and entertainment

Los Angeles Times media critic David Shaw has a column today arguing that "News as entertainment is sadly becoming the norm."

He asserts, based on observations by university professors who have studied media habits, that people are intellectually lazy. He says, "They don't want to sort through conflicting reports, often presented in a relatively dry, factual fashion, to figure out what's important and who's right in any news-making scenario." He goes on:

I think young people — those in their late teens and 20s — are particularly susceptible to these one-sided, half-baked news mcnuggets. Thanks to MTV, and instant messaging and other rapid-fire features of the Internet, most young people today want everything in quick, small bites. They get their news — to the extent that they get any — inadvertently, almost by osmosis, absorbing bits of it on various websites or between the radio play of their favorite songs or while clicking the television remote control.

Shaw quotes another professor, who argues that other trends are also contributing to the loss of a "news habit" among Americans:

"The wealthier a society is, the more self-consciously individualistic it is and the less an individual feels obligated to consider things outside oneself and one's immediate interests," says Robert Calvert, a political science professor at DePauw University. "The last thing kids want out of a college education today is to learn how to be a better citizen. All they're concerned with is career preparation."

Calvert thinks this mind-set leads to more — worse — than mere civic ignorance.

"You wind up with people working for, and maybe at the top of, major industries who have no interest in institutions or in our cultural and moral environment, and that's a real national problem," he says. "That's how you wind up with Enron."

What do you think of these arguments? Does the media technology we use today affect our power to reason, to deliberate? How would describe the news habit in your home? How does it affect your life and perspective?