Power and Celebrity

In his 1999 book, How the News Makes Us Dumb , C. John Sommerville wisely notes the difference between power and celebrity. He notes that news is a product, determined by “what publishers think they can get us interested in and get us to pay for.” There’s no reason, then, to think that events in the news are the most important events taking place: “In fact, there is reason to doubt that. Important people don’t like to be in the news. Power could probably be defined as the ability to keep onself out of the news. Celebrities like to be in the news, and the media have found that we will pay as much to read about them as about important people. So we fill our minds with a lot of fun stories, while the powerful go about their business.”