Tapu Misa: Current affairs choices just a click away

Gossip about Tiger Wood's relationships proved popular among readers. Photo / AP

What did Tiger say to the porn star? Only by a supreme effort of will did I resist the urge to find out. (It may have helped that I didn't care.)

But if you were one of those who felt compelled, either by curiosity or lack of anything better to do, to click on the story when it appeared on the Herald website last week - making it the sixth most popular that day - then, please, don't complain to me about the media's seeming obsession with sex scandals, celebrity gossip and so-called entertainment "news".

You're getting what you asked for. Where you click, we follow. As we must in these days of ever-diminishing advertising dollars and shrinking newsrooms.

Last month, the Pew Research Centre in the United States published the results of an internet survey which asked: Is Google making us stupid? (The majority verdict was "no".)

It reminded me of when I used to tell my children that exposure to some television programmes would make them dumber. I made them watch the news, instead. Now I wonder if some of what passes as news is making us stupid.

If we're headed in the same direction as the Americans - and it seems we are, we're in trouble. As Robert F. Kennedy jnr, an environmental lawyer and the son of Robert F. snr, has said, "Americans are the best entertained and least informed people on the face of the Earth".

Kennedy has harsh words for both the traditional media and the increasingly raucous right-wing crowd who inhabit talk radio and cable TV. He accuses the former of serving their shareholders rather than the public interest, "not by explaining the difficult issues we need to understand to make rational decisions in a democracy but, rather, by entertaining us, by appealing to the lowest common denominator - the prurient interest that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brains for sex and celebrity gossip".

The latter he lambasts for twisting the news and deliberately deceiving the public.

Kennedy argues that this state of affairs has "profound implications for our democracy, because a democracy cannot function long without an informed public".

He cites a 2004 survey by PIPA, the Programme on International Policy Attitudes, which found that there was, as he puts it, an "information deficit" among Republicans who re-elected George W. Bush in the 2004 election.

For example, 72 per cent of Bush supporters believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, 75 per cent believed that Iraq provided substantial support to al Qaeda, 82 per cent believed the rest of the world liked the US better thanks to the invasion of Iraq or that views were evenly divided, and most believed the war had strong support in the Islamic world.

None of which was true.

Significantly, most of those Republicans agreed that if Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and was not providing assistance to al Qaeda, the US should not have gone to war.

"I came to the conclusion a long time ago," Kennedy quips, "that 80 per cent of Republicans are just Democrats who don't know what's going on."

Where did their false beliefs come from? According to the study, "the extent of Americans' misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news.

Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions". If anything, the news is worse now.

One has only to look at the lies spread about Barack Obama during the 2008 election campaign (that he wasn't even born in America, for example), about the healthcare reform legislation (and its mythical death panels), and the unfocused anger of ill-informed Tea Partyers to understand just how influential Fox and talk radio are.

While Matthew Freud, the great-grandson of Sigmund and son-in-law of Fox's owner Rupert Murdoch, told the New York Times this year that he's "ashamed and sickened by [Fox News chief] Roger Ailes' horrendous and sustained disregard" of proper journalistic standards, the cable channel's US$700 million ($988 million) annual profit speaks more loudly.

A just-released Pew report on the state of the US news media confirms that the only old media with growing audience numbers last year was cable, "a place where the lion's share of resources are spent on opinionated hosts" and where Fox News reigns, ahead of more neutral heavyweights like CNN.

Everyone says they want intelligent, probing journalism, but fewer of us are prepared to support it. According to the Pew report, old-fashioned reporting is being squeezed out by commentary and argument. And the more ornery and attacking, the more popular it is.

Technology is changing not just the way news is reported, but the choices about what news is reported.

In the old model of journalism, editors assembled a wide range of news stories - "and the value of each story was subordinate to the value, and the aggregate audience, of the whole", and "the value of the story might be found in its consequence rather than its popularity".

But that tradition is breaking down. Online readers "hunting the news by topic and by event and grazing across multiple outlets" are now calling the shots. Their choices are changing both the finances and the culture of the newsrooms. "When revenue is more closely tied to each story, what is the rationale for covering civic news that is consequential but has only limited interest?"

In the US, the internet now ranks ahead of radio and newspapers as the primary source of news for Americans.

Some might applaud the demise of old media. But as the Pew report points out, for all the robust activity in the new media, most of the debate on the blogosphere and social media is still heavily dependent on reporting that began in the old media. So the cutbacks in newsrooms are not only drastically affecting traditional media but significantly impact online content as well.

Can a media organisation that builds its brand around neutral reporting and balanced conversation succeed? In a commercially driven media world, that's up to the market.