Condi vs. Britney: Will hard or soft news win?

Mainstream media could go either way, but soft news is easier to cover.

from the February 27, 2007 edition

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If all those numbers reflect larger news audience tendencies, then there is good and bad in all this.

On the plus side, some Americans are choosing a more substantive news diet than they once did. They are paying more and are getting news that is broader and deeper than the news they used to get.

But the shrinking of that news audience in the middle, the mass news audience, is troubling. In the current media culture, there is a trend toward specialization that may leave some outlets in a position where they have to choose which way to go. Increasingly, "mass news audiences" seem more like phantoms than real entities, and those outlets that are trying to reach them, such as Time, Newsweek, and the cable news networks, are struggling.

And if the mainstream news media edge toward one of these paths of coverage – serious or light – the easiest and cheapest path is the one that leads to the late Anna Nicole Smith's trial or Britney Spears's rehab trips.

Serious news gathering, reporting, and writing is not easy. It takes correspondents and bureaus, time and money. Covering celebrity news, frankly, is easier. What's more, rather than make complicated and significant issues interesting, one need only piggyback on the built-in fame of the celebrity.

Consider last week's tabloid hubbubs – the death of a former C-list celebrity in Ms. Smith and the rehab hokey-pokey of a pop star who hasn't been on the pop charts in years, Ms. Spears. These stories are not difficult to cover.

All you needed to cover the Smith trial was a camera in the Fort Lauderdale courtroom where a judge was deciding who would get possession of her body.

For Spears, a simple shot of her recently buzzed coif would do, along with, of course, concert footage of her gyrating. Throw in a few celebrity and judicial experts, and voilà, instant coverage.

Where a bifurcating news audience leads isn't yet clear, but consider a poll from the Pew Center for the People and Press in 2006 that showed that viewers of MSNBC and Fox News (both of which reveled in Smith coverage last week) could only answer one out of three basic knowledge questions on the news, including: Who is the US secretary of State? and Who is the president of Russia?

It's enough to make one wonder if the ending point is a nation made up of a small number of people knowledgeable enough to cast an informed vote and a big chunk who can recite the celebrity police blotter entries by rote.

• Dante Chinni, a senior associate at the Project for Excellence in Journalism, writes a twice-monthly column on media issues. E-mail him at Dante Chinni

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