To everybody considering this a good thing (and even to those considering this a bad thing), I suggest reading Neil Postman's excellent cautionary analysis Amus

To everybody considering this a good thing (and even to those considering this a bad thing), I suggest reading Neil Postman's excellent cautionary analysis Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985 and subsequent revisions): basically he predicted that a 24-hour news cycle and bombastic personalities with debates framed in terms of fifteen-second sound-bites would result in politics becoming nothing more than a form of entertainment, and that citizens would begin to respond to it as such. That was with few-to-many traditional mass-media; with social media the tendency has become (counterintuitively) if anything even more heightened. It's a horrific state of affairs. Anyway, it’s a book I first read in 1998 and though written in the Regan years struck me as being unbelievably pertinent even to the world when I first read it, let alone now. I remember that right after the Columbine mass-shooting in 1999 my best friend and I were sitting in his bedroom. We were late teenagers (18), expatriates living in Italy, getting our “international” news from the very first online news sources such as cnn.com and the bbc website. George W. Bush was clearly on track to become the Republican candidate and was equally clearly under the thumb of the NRA. I remember muttering that if the Democrats had any sense they'd deploy against him with a candidate with mass-market appeal... “Oprah Winfrey or Jerry Springer, and sod the consequences”. My friend, wise beyond his years, presciently remarked “Jerry Springer I shan't deign with a response, but Oprah Winfrey and the touchy-feely feel-good stuff of folks like Robin Williams is all that is bad about what is good about America... the day a party will nominate one of those to run as their candidate you'll know it's all over, the experiment of the Founding Fathers will have gone down the drain, it'll be the end of everything because the system will have the means but no incentive to recover”. Those words have haunted me ever since. I reminded him of that grim pronouncement of his just the other day (coincidentally the day Oprah gave that speech was also the exact same day he became a father) and he just looked at me with tired eyes that glasses over with sadness.