The message put forth in News Wars does not surprise me. With the stresses and hassles of daily life who truly has time to sit and read a full newspaper each day. Even when people do have time to relax and watch television they normally do not want to be bothered with an hour long monotonous news cast. For these reasons news is diverting away from its original version to become a form of on demand entertainment which is made possible by technology.

Increased use of the internet is the largest factor towards the changing news industry. Instead of buying a newspaper every morning consumers can just as easily go onto the internet and read the news that interests them. If consumers like watching newscasts instead of reading them, videos can be downloaded daily and watched at the consumer’s convenience much like having a DVR or Ti-Vo. Large news company’s such as MSNBC are now turning towards online news casting to reach a broader audience. Besides large corporations, small private companies along with individual entities post their version of the news on the web for everyone to see.

This diversity in the news is causing large corporations to find different ways to please their customer and turn a profit. These different ways include making the news more entertaining to be watched. This causes news programs to steer away from real news and more towards investigative pieces that people will find interesting such as “How to Catch a Predator”. One of the most popular news shows is Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” which consists of humorous takes on “normal” daily news. When a comedy show is considered one of the most popular news shows it changes the quality of editorial content. Large and small news corporations alike care less about the quality of editorial content and more towards their ratings and profits. Editorial content is also put in great jeopardy by individual entities posting “news” without the need for editing or confirmation that their posting is truly factual.

This could have a great impact on our culture and society. People are not necessarily getting the news that is important to them. They may not even be getting news that is factual. In order to get the news people want and need they normally need to turn to online news. This is changing American culture because people will no longer need to read the newspaper each morning or watch the news each evening. This deviation away from print and television news will cause people to stop seeing all the news and let them just watch or read the news that matters to them. If you don’t wish to hear about the war in Iraq you can easily go online for your news and avoid articles related to it. While this may seem convenient it may ultimately cause the American population to be less informed as a whole and having an uniformed population can have serious ramifications.