People say they want hard news, but they won’t tune in to watch hard news (think city council meetings), and so these people won’t pay the bills. You need people who come every day, news or no news. The surge for one-off events won’t work day-to-day.

Remember the product of news organizations is not news; it is you. They sell you to advertisers.

Whether there is a successful business model for news that does not cater to this soap audience is an open question. I doubt there is.

In any case, the strategic route to having this air-head minority audience choose the topics for national debate is to ridicule the soap audience, not the networks. The networks know they’re producing crap, and also that their target demographic likes crap.

The “serious news” posture is marketing : you soap-opera women are serious people because we say so. They like that.