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Scholarly evaluations of the quality of news are often negative, sometimes scathingly so. The rise of soft news and market-driven journalism in recent years has increased the intensity of this criticism. This article argues, however, that much criticism of news is based on an ideal of citizenship and a standard of quality that are neither realistic nor necessary for the functioning of democracy. The article therefore proposes a new, less demanding standard of quality and defends it as adequate to the informational needs of citizens in a democracy.
John Zaller (Tue,) studied this question.