Have you spent much of the holiday season debating whether Justin Bieber really intends to retire?
No? Well, what about the question of whether Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson was rightly suspended for making bigoted remarks, or was in fact suppressed for giving voice to traditional values?
Stories like this have flared up throughout 2013, a mix of celebrity and mini-scandals. They may not have had much to do with war or peace or anyone's ability to find work, but for a day or two Americans found diversion in making fun of Bieber for writing a fan letter to himself in the guestbook at Anne Frank's house, or the way Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio seemed to struggle to drink water during his response to President Obama's State of the Union address.
Or, of course, Miley Cyrus twerking.
There's nothing new about silly stories getting a lot of attention, but the Internet has upended old news values that demanded you put war and the economy on the front page and relegate fluff to Page 18.
"There was a structural way newspapers kept all that stuff separated," says Robert Thompson, a pop culture professor at Syracuse University. "The Internet totally annihilates that kind of structure."
If all stories are created equal, in the sense of each having its own space on a Web page, then the ones that get linked to and clicked on the most might be those that are more amusing or titillating than informative.
Even aficionados of hard news may be more likely to share via social media a funny video of a beauty pageant contestant flubbing an answer than the latest developments in the Syrian civil war.
News has always presented a mixture of information and entertainment, says Daniel Hallin, a professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego. Important events such as the Boston Marathon bombing and the deaths of Nelson Mandela and Margaret Thatcher rank high on lists of this year's most-shared stories.
But in an age when the digital readership of every story can be measured, the balance has shifted more toward the fun stuff.
"News in general is just much more market-oriented than it once was," Hallin says. "Now, when click-through rates and 'most tweeted' become important criteria, the assumption is much more that you give people what they want to see."
The CNN news ticker at the corner of Sunset & Cahuenga is a real-time chronicle of the death of American journalism.
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) June 21, 2013