Blogs.Reuters, Jack Shafer, 2011

After Broadcast News attacks the foolishness of people like Koppel who insist on a set-in-concrete distinction between news and entertainment. Comedians, talk-show hosts, and satirists are better equipped than professional journalists to refute the fictions that clog the news stream, Williams and Delli Carpini maintain. “[T]he line between news and entertainment is inherently blurred and contestable and never fully maps the boundaries between politically relevant media forms. It was only the regulations, institutions, norms, and practices that came to define the broadcast news media regime that made such distinctions seem natural,” they write. 

One excellent example of this blurring offered by Williams and Delli Carpini is the work and career of CBS News legend Edward R. Murrow, who in the early 1950s investigated wrong-doings with his See It Now program at the same time he was chatting up celebrities (Brando, Bogart, Monroe, Sinatra) on his Person to Person broadcasts.

"Comedians, talk-show hosts, and satirists are better equipped than professional journalists to refute the fictions that clog the news stream" And better equipped than academics.

After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment Published in 2011. I'd have to read it to find out if the authors are smart enough to see how their argument undermines the claims of their own field.

Comedians and Lawyers, theory vs practice, Socrates vs Aristophanes, etc.

"[T]he line between news and entertainment is inherently blurred"

So much for the distinction between high value and low value, propositional and expressive, serious and non-serious, parasitic speech.

So much for philosophy.
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serendipity.