Screaming sirens pierce the air as pedestrians stumble around, dazed from the blast. The crater where the car once stood idling is starting to fill with water from ruptured underground pipes and the blood of innocent bystanders. Women are beginning to wail on the sidewalk, choking on tears and the lingering dust cloud.

“Hey honey, can you pass the salt?”

Welcome to the evening entertainment, sorry, the evening news. Events of the day are prepackaged into easy-to-swallow bits of carefully edited heart churning images crafted to stir feelings of outrage or disbelief as we slice into the pork chops on our dinner plate. Network anchors in tailored suits have become our private jesters performing one act tales of woe while we feast. News is entertainment.

There was a time when news was useful. It happened to us directly or affected the world we lived in. A storm destroyed our neighbors barn, and they need help. The price of feed corn is increasing. Little Timmy is stuck in a well! Our lives have changed. We don’t go to a well, raise our own livestock, or know our neighbors name. We are less connected to each other, and yet more “informed” about the rest of the world.

The violence happening in Syria is sad but, in reality, has no effect on my life. Unless there are Molotov cocktails bursting into flame on my street, I am only a spectator. I have no need to grasp the complexity of American energy dependence, or a European national debt crisis. Give me one sentence summaries, a few pictures and move on.

“What?! Whitney Houston just died? Turn up the volume.”

Television news, with its 24-hour cycle, quest for ad revenue, and all consuming need to be the first to break any story about anything, is an unquenchable beast of a machine filling its bottomless gullet with anything that wanders to close. A father suspected of killing his wife just set his house on fire, burning himself and his two sons alive with him? Lets get a live shot of the flames! Hollywood starlet strung out on drugs appears in court for petty theft? We need to talk to the officer that booked her! There is a new Republican front-runner. Wait! A new one! Ooooh! Oscar fashions! If it bleeds, it leads. If it bleeds, involves a music icon and questionable medical practices, it leads for weeks!  Are you not entertained?

Twenty seven years ago, Neil Postman, in his classic book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, looks at the current state of television and predicts a grim outcome:

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility. (155)

That future is now. CNN, FOX News, and MSNBC compete to be the biggest act in a gaudy three-ring circus.

It’s true that some say The Daily Show blurred the line between broadcast news and satire. It borrowed the graphics, music, pacing, and segments from the major news outlets and created an irreverent take on otherwise serious television programs. Julia R. Fox, assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University found in a 2006 study that the content of the faux news program  “…is just as substantive as network coverage.” If the content of The Daily Show is as substantial as CNN or FOX News, then the only difference is the plot. One is comedic; the others are dramatic, but both are entertainment. Perhaps the viewership of The Daily Show continues to grow because it proudly calls itself what it is — entertainment.

There is nothing wrong with entertainment. It is a vital part or our lives. Drama, tragedy, comedy, and mystery provide sweet oases from our day, but entertainment requires nothing but consumption from us. We scoot up to the rotating buffet and slurp away at whatever tickles our fancy, a heaping pile of primary debate sound bites, smothered in a lumpy analysis gravy.

I am pretty sure there are serious things that need thoughtful consideration. There must be weighty subjects that demand a full contact encounter that asks something from us. Keep flipping channels to find out what they might might be. Perhaps debate and discourse are not as critical to our culture as we might think they—

“What! Who got snubbed at the Grammys? Shhhh! The Super Bowl ad is coming on again! Oh! A surfing dog! It’s a Real House Wives cat fight! I’m bored, turn the channel.”