News or piffle

Net Results: So which came first, the dumbing down of media or the internet? Anyone with a sense of media history can tell you that the movement away from hard news coverage and towards lifestyle and celebrity piffle started well before the net had anything like a significant presence.

Many however would see a correlation between "news lite" and the ever-growing role of the internet in the way media is consumed.

You really only have to look at the popularity of a site such as the Drudge Report (drudegreport.com) and the way it has made trash stories front-line news for its massive audience to see that more measured media sources might think: "We'll offer a bit of that too".

The defining moment for the Drudge Report, and perhaps for a certain kind of salacious story's ability to cross over now into serious news, was the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky saga that nearly became a presidential impeachment.

Drudge reported it first and the rest was certainly history - though whether anyone really cared or ever should have cared is another thing.

In the current context of wars, terrorism, eco-fears and the massive burden of developing world debt, getting upset over the sexual peccadilloes of a public figure seems even sillier than it did to many of us at the time.

And, one might argue, the Drudge Report is the Drudge Report - its entire purpose is gossip and dirt and that's what people go there for.

However, it isn't as if the media lost its silly head over a sexual scandal and then, post-9/11, set its nose back to the current events grindstone.

Pick up a newspaper, watch the television news or listen to the radio broadcasts and there's no indication at all that a weightier current events agenda has superseded the silly trash celebrity stories. If anything, the trash is ever more prevalent. Two words: Paris Hilton.

The wall-to-wall coverage of this woman's tedious life has got to be the phenomenon of our times. I can see her place in between the covers of Hello!, but how did her release from a minuscule prison stint end up as the lead news story for so many supposedly credible and serious media outlets recently? She even made the top of the news on the hourly bulletins on RTÉ Radio One.

No wonder hundreds of thousands have flocked to see the YouTube video of American newscaster Mika Brzezinski refusing to read the item as her lead story on an MSNBC morning news programme despite her producer's attempt to keep handing it back to her as the lead.

On the day when a key Republican senator and Bush supporter indicated he would be unlikely to support further funding for the Iraq war - major news - Brzezinski out and out refused, on air, to lead with Hilton.

She tries to burn the script, she tears it up and finally, the third time it is handed to her, she puts it through the shredder. View it here: http://tinyurl.com/2jmu6r. Magnificent.

In the wake of her lone act, some commentators were saying the Parisification of mainstream media was largely due to the internet - it has drained the audiences for print and broadcast media, which struggle to win back readers, viewers and listeners with tales of Wags, Paris and the latest celebrity to detox.

Is that true? I think it is a lot more complicated. First off, readership of newspapers was dropping before Matt Drudge ever considered paying for a URL. Reality television thrived on its own without much help from the internet (though, granted, plenty were happy to go watch hours of dullness on the Big Brother webcams.

Personally, my dull webcam of choice is the very slowly aging wheel of cheese on CheddarVision, www.cheddarvision.tv).

Some, maybe much, of the shift to online news is to real news - witness the massive growth in the Guardian Unlimited's website from the start of the Iraq war, with most new traffic coming from a US wanting weightier coverage than was easily found in the States - or to discussion of issues on current events weblogs, among those with the biggest audiences.

If the internet arguably gave birth to the monster that is Paris Hilton (by making her ex-boyfriend's notorious sex video of the pair available to a global audience), the internet has also supplied a perfectly succinct critique of it in the Brzenzinski clip, with just one of several versions posted watched over a million and a half times by last Monday.

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