I believe you have touched on something important, here. Like diners at a buffet, people tend to gravitate to reading what they WANT to read. Society has become increasingly insular with the proliferation of technology and the mass media, and social, cultural and political polarization has continued to increase.

There are some advantages to from-the-top-down reporting that people need to seriously keep in mind. Without it, we may develop a society of specialists of their own particular interest, but they could easily remain ignorant of a lot of the important news that could be effecting change in their lives without their knowlege.

This goes a long way to explaining the current situation in the administration, at present…

That being said, I live in the Flemish part of Belgium.
I no longer watch TV.
I watch YouTube.
Although I must say the low quality content over there starts to annoy me.
I stopped buying newspapers.
When I read one it’s because the newspaper is given to me for free.
I stopped buying magazines too.
I now read blogs.
None of my friends read blogs.
When Steve Jobs showed everyone the iPhone, they didn’t know about it until I told them about it. That was 15 hours after Steve’s keynote.
They googled iPhone.

Slowly, but it’s coming…

I work on the entertainment side of the media business, and while I generally think it’s great that consumers will be able to assemble disparate pieces of content to read/view in as they see fit, the resulting fragmentation–particularly of news and editorial content–could have highly detrimental effects on the social fabric of democracies around the world. In other words, this is what I would call the dark side of media fragmentation.

From the perspective of the end-user, if everyone becomes his or her own newspaper editor, many people will subscribe to editorial content from writers/producers with whom they agree, and selectively aggregate news articles that similarly reflect their existing biases. This condition could be exacerbated by content providers, who (once they’ve grasped the idea that they need to “sell” articles or their equivalents rather than newspapers) will likely adopt advertising models tied to views of specific articles. This would then provide a further economic incentive for content providers of all sizes to produce material that is targeted to these specific groups — in other words, this ad model could stimulate the creation of content that reinforces the views of its intended micro-audience (or perhaps conversely, is anathema to them for the purposes of provoking a controversy).

Over many years, I suspect that these two forces, one consumer-driven (content self-selection) and the other advertiser-driven (micro-targeted ad buys), could cause entire generations to grow up without ever having been exposed to alternate viewpoints, resulting in an increasingly polarized electorate.

And when the consumer will be fed up of consuming what is already prepared and wants to begin again to cook?
To choose? To be able to select?
When will consumers be again fed up with the more than usual soup? Because the ones who produce that special content will not have enough to supply daily, will have to recook what they served one week ago.
What if the consumers will be tired to read and know everything of nothing?

Welcome the old world of newspaper where you opened a new one everyday, without knowing what you were going to find inside.
Where you could discover that yes, on the contrary of what you believed, you can also be interested in cooking, or in certain sports, or in erotic or, may be of what happens in political life or in your town…
What id suddenly you found out that the news is nothing, what matters is the one who tells it, or writes it.
That everything can be interesting, providing that somebody is able to write it in an interesting way.
That was once called “good journalism” “independent journalism” “real journalism”.

May be that is what consumers are looking for.
They are looking for the news that interests them, and ANY NEWS could be, providing that…

http://leeaase.wordpress.com/2007/05/07/star-tribulation/

It looks like they’re following the Jarvis plan of focusing on local and buying or linking to features that are more national or global.