At any rate, this brings me back to the topic of Informationism and its relationship to the media, where I concluded
In general, informationism, as a method for determining truth, accepts as its fundamental premise, that the more mainstream a source, the more credible the source.
Of course this leads to a basic problem, and that is what I refer to as the Pop Media. We often find that many Mainstream Media outlets are not in fact the most reliable source of information. Now, in the past, I credited this to ideological bias. I have to be honest, I no longer believe this to be the case, I have, in fact, become even more cynical as I look at the evidence.
This is one of the phenomena of popular culture. It is the basic premise that it is market based, which by nature would lead to the assumption that Truth is Marketbased, which is to say, Truth is for sale to the highest bidder.
When we look at todays media, its all about ratings. And this brings about the discussion of the Soft Media vs Hard media
The idea of hard news embodies two orthogonal concepts:
Seriousness: Politics, economics, crime, war, and disasters are considered serious topics, as are certain aspects of law, business, science, and technology.
Timeliness: Stories that cover current events—the progress of a war, the results of a vote, the breaking out of a fire, a significant statement, the freeing of a prisoner, an economic report of note.
The logical opposite, soft news is sometimes referred to in a derogatory fashion as infotainment. Defining features catching the most criticism include:
The least serious subjects: Arts and entertainment, sports, lifestyles, "human interest", and celebrities.
Not timely: There is no precipitating event triggering the story, other than a reporter's curiosity.
Timely events happen in less serious subjects—sporting matches, celebrity misadventures, movie releases, art exhibits, and so on.
Now when we look at the advent of talk news, we see how the two of these combine into the very slogan of Glenn Beck.
The Fusion of Entertainment and Enlightenment
Which leads us back to the concept of the Pop Media. What needs to be stated is that which separates the Mainstream Media from the Pop Media. And that is the underlying goal that it is trying to achieve. As I said, the Mainstream Media is assumed to be a credible source of information.
In contrast, the underlying goal of the Pop Media is to generate ratings. The claim being that greater ratings are equal to greater truth. It rests on the assumption that the world is as we believe. And so by shifting public opinion, one can in fact create truth.
