In today's WaPost George F. Will deplores the precipitous decline in news reporting as technology turns the news into strictly entertainment.

Time was, journalists assumed that news consumers demanded “more information, faster and better.” Now, instantaneous communication via passive media — video and television — supplies what indolent consumers demand.

More than half of Americans between ages 16 and 74 read below the sixth-grade level. Video, however, requires only eyes on screens. But such passive media cannot communicate a civilization defined by ideas. Our creedal nation, Stirewalt says, “requires written words and a common culture in which to understand them.”

In the 1830s, new printing methods radically reduced the cost of producing a culture of literate news readers. In the 1930s, however, radio — which was more transformative than what it paved the way for: television — became, Stirewalt says, a passively absorbed alternative to the comparative arduousness of literacy.

Technology — radio, television, the internet — turned journalism from reporting what had happened to reporting what was happening, and now to giving passive news consumers the emotional experience of having their political beliefs ratified. “By 1983,” Stirewalt reports, “the percentage of Americans who got their news from television alone pulled ahead of all newspaper use” by offering “a passive, more emotionally engaged product”: “Television news can be far more emotionally compelling than the written version, and does not come with the need for nearly as much cultural literacy or the challenge of … internalizing ideas.”

I would add this is the main cause of increasing ignorance in this country.