The majority of mainstream news is made for our entertainment. In my opinion, not everything on television needs to be entertaining. Here is my take on the mockery that is news today.

How do you get your news?

Think about that before you move on. You get information from somewhere, so is it the evening news, a news network, the Internet, Twitter or your friends?

According to some reports, most of us (people going to college) get our news from Jon Stewart and his cohorts at The Daily Show. Really, who can blame us? Have you ever tried to watch Diane Sawyer on ABC’s World News Tonight? Let’s just say that she doesn’t have many poop jokes. Heck, she barely has any jokes at all. Isn’t the news supposed to entertain me?

Yeah, that was heavy in sarcasm but let’s face it, when we watch the news, we want to be entertained. Look at the rise of Fox News. I’m not going to make the claim that the news world was unbiased before Fox News surfaced because that would be completely wrong.

The history of news is more interesting than it sounds. Type “yellow journalism” into a Google search (please avoid the horrible excuse for a search engine called Bing) to see what past, so-called journalists were capable of doing when they swayed public opinion. Seriously, the yellow journalists make the current crop of news demagogues look like the crowd from

Sesame Street.

When it comes down to it, we (children, college students, adults, etc.) love to be entertained, even if it comes at the cost of reliable news.

Make no mistake, I do enjoy watching The Daily Show every now and then. The people on that show have a knack for pointing out the idiocies on both sides of the political spectrum (even though they typically focus their jokes on the conservative side). However, what does that actually do for us? What is that giving the viewing audience?

There’s an argument that the people watching the show will want to learn more about current events. In order to do that, they’ll turn to more venerable news sources.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I certainly don’t do that. When I watch The Daily Show, I laugh at the jokes and then I go about my day. If that news topic is brought up in conversation, I reference the pieces of information that the show gave me and sometimes I throw in the jokes for free (I’m a good guy like that). At no point did I go out and brush up on the actual facts. I just trusted the “information” that was giving to me.

I’m not entirely sure why anyone would ever think that Americans (not just college students) would be so ambitious about our news. What have we done recently to prove that we aren’t lazy when it come to anything that isn’t fun for us? I’m willing to guess that a lot of people can’t think of anything more boring than reading/watching the news. I could be wrong (I hope I am) but it would seem that our desire to be entertained overwhelms our desire to actually get reputable news.

We need to be more discerning about the news that we receive.

I have no problem with people like Bill O’Reilly or Rachel Maddow sharing their opinions every night. That right is constitutionally protected and it should be. However, that doesn’t mean that the rest of us should take what they say as the truth.

We need to read the news from both sides and figure out for ourselves what we think. We need to move past having other people tell us what the truth is. We’re more than capable of thinking for ourselves. So let’s get to it. Let’s stop calling people’s opinions and satire news.

After we start thinking for ourselves about the news, we can go back to using fart jokes that we heard on The Daily Show, and that’s what we all really want.