Neil Postman argued in "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business" (1985) that entertainment had become the "supra-ideology of al

Neil Postman argued in "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business" (1985) that entertainment had become the "supra-ideology of all discourse on television". Good television is entertaining while bad television is not, so we learn to judge all content on television based on its entertainment value. "Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images." I think Postman's comments are extremely relevant today (30 years after 1985) except that now they would apply to the Facebook news feed. (The quote about 'exchanging images' is now literally true.) The role of "news as entertainment" does a lot to explain the Trump's emergence as a candidate in the first place (he got a lot of coverage early on because of his outlandishness).