The meaning of the phrase "hard news" and its tendentious complement "soft news" has changed dramatically over the past few decades. News is treacherously hard to define in an age when issues like L'affaire Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are regularly covered in hard news programs and turkey contests are adjudicated within a news program right after news about homicides (Fox News, 10/26/06, Morning News Programming).

Soft news items have increasingly proliferated hard news programming in the past few decades. Aside from content, news programming has also been transformed stylistically since the advent of cable and now features production ploys (and values) that are reminiscent of entertainment - for example, use of sound and graphics in major news programs.

It is disconcerting that shows like Bill O Reilly's eponymous O' Reilly Factor, which use confrontation and group identity rituals to entertain their audiences and feature topics like the war of Christmas, have become the staple of hard news. It is also important to note that soft news is not limited to television but pervades other forms of media. Pew researchers found in 2004 that 17% of the public regularly listens to talk radio. While the true numbers for definable soft news items may be contested, the content and style of hard news has inarguably shifted towards soft news.

Let's train our attention towards understanding the reasons behind the rise of soft news, which has been generally understood to be the result of twin economic pressures to lower production costs for news and increase audience (for basically the same information). The latter half of the argument is predicated on the assumption, which appears to be true, that the majority of audience members in the United States like to be entertained by news.

The popularity of entertainment news, a sub section of soft news, can also be understood as a function of economy. In particular, information about celebrities has become increasingly important for social intercourse with friends, family, and colleagues at work.

Given the salience of entertainment news in social intercourse, it is but natural that people will pay more attention to entertainment information. It always surprises me how well informed people are about entertainment news. In a related point, one can also look at the rise in entertainment news as a reflection of the fundamental shift in economy - from an economy where significant value addition happened in production and now happens during marketing.

Celebrities are often the pioneers of new fashion trends and early adopters of lifestyle gadgets. The focus on celebrities can be seen as a ploy to sell more things. Other researchers have argued that the popularity of soft news stems from the dry, pompous, elitist model of hard news that resorted to intellectualizing rather than presenting stories with human interest.

It is important to understand if/how the proliferation of soft news affects its consumers. As I argued above, rise in consumption of soft news may lead to a rise in consumerism. Consumption of soft news can also have significant political effects. To understand those effects fully, we must carefully analyze how soft news differs from hard news.