By entertaining the public rather than informing them, the United States news media has become increasingly focused on amusing the public, creating a mass spread of biased and polarized information.
Oftentimes, the blend between entertainment and objective news is lazily created, with attention-grabbing headlines and articles, for the sole purpose of getting the readers’ engagement.
This diverts news further from its aim, the spread of information. The mix between the two is referred to as infotainment.
Infotainment, as defined by Britannica, is “television programming that presents information (as news) in a manner intended to be entertaining.”
When you only present news in an attention-grabbing manner, you switch from presenting facts to content made to amuse the public.
Knowing when to draw the line between information and entertainment is a challenge. It is important to distinguish between a feature of a light-hearted story about a local event and something meant to entertain.
What someone may find “newsworthy” will vary person to person; it is the primary job of the journalist to determine what people will find as informational as possible and not entertaining.
While infotainment is not inherently wrong or bad, the direction it has been heading is concerning.
Instead of reporting on the human interest elements of news, like features, current infotainment is prevalent in all genres of news. You see it in the headlines you read, the news channels you watch, nearly everywhere there is news, manipulated information for the sake of entertainment will follow.
The more theatrical the news grows, the less information people actually consume.
Headlines are made to drive user engagement, not to inform; programs are made to entertain the masses rather than give people an accurate gauge of what’s happening.
These outlandish headlines are designed to rile the reader up and force them to have a reaction instead of learning about the situation. This style does nothing except leave the reader more polarized than before and just as informed as before, according to the Oxford Press.
Instead of discussing the nuance of the situation at hand, whether it be the economic or the political state of the world, these infotainment articles and sources paint a purely black-and-white picture of the event.
Leaving the situation in black and white or good vs bad makes it easier for the audience to digest and drives interaction with the article or source.
You may be wondering why journalists and the mass media are taking to tactics like this. Money.
As journalists drive more people to their platforms, the more people interact, the more money they make from ad revenue.
Infotainment is very commonly seen on social media. Because so many people can post and say whatever they’d like on social media, it allows for lies to be spread just as fast as the truth.
People will take whatever they see on social media and take it at face value, and not fact-check it whatsoever.
All of these issues call attention to the larger problem at hand, a decline in journalistic literacy, according to Andrews University. Instead of taking things as fact head-on, we all need to look for the source behind the material we read.