The best idea Scott Adams ever had was the generic newspaper. Given that every story in the news has become as predictable in content and flow as a Harlequin Romance, Dogbert created a newspaper which supplied all the storylines and quotes, and just left the names and places blank.

We all know the litany. If the story is about a plan, it will focus on opposition. If it is environmental, the story it quote members of Greenpeace or the Sierra Club, regardless of whether they live in the area affected, or know anyone who does. If the issue is education, the system is a disaster. If the story is immigration, it will mention racism.

If the news is about the economy, a crime, trial, natural disaster, or war, the focus will be on the anguish of the victim(s) or survivors, with one of a small selection of standard photographs. If it is an election, the media will concentrate on candidates' personalities, while bemoaning the lack of issues. If it is political news of any other sort, it will be scandal. If it is about health, it either causes or cures cancer. If it is about science, it is just wrong.

The 18th century theorists of democracy recognised the value of a free press in creating an informed citizenry. We have a free press in most of Europe, North America, and a few outposts in Asia. Are we creating better informed citizens? If being informed about the scandals of royalty or the trial of the latest erring celebrity or serial sex murderer matters, I guess we are. Somehow, I do not think this is the information we need to make our various versions of democracy work.

How has it happened that the world's democracies have the world's most predictable news? I would suggest three forces in action. The first is human fondness for the familiar -- what Terry Patchett's Patrician called the olds. Starting as children who want to hear the same story over and over, growing into adults who limit their recreational reading to one or two genres, we like the reassurance of the predictable ending. News, however, is supposed to be about the new, or the important, not about the tried and true. If one wants predictablity, one can get it from television sitcoms or mystery novels.

The second influence is the modern prediliction for fashionable cynicism. Much of this is based on a misreading of physical relativity, and the application of that misreading to the humanities and society. The fact that one's position in the universe affects how one perceives the behaviour of physical objects and forces has come to justify complete cynicism about truth in all fields of human endeavour, including news reporting. One wonders how the fashionable relativist deals with the fact that the speed of light is a constant in relativity theory. It seems that, in the physical universe, there is one truth. Not in the cultural universe.

But the most important force is the perception by managers of profit in catering to the Lowest Common Denominator. Recently, in one of the endlessly self-indulgent media self examinations on the issue of a feeding frenzy, one of the panelists protested that, despite the opprobrium heaped on the media, "people were watching it". The reply of a member of the public: "There was no other news to watch!"

And, that is the real problem. Thirty years ago, there was other news to watch or read. There were serious magazines, newspapers and broadcasts alongside the tabloids and middle level press. These have all but died, except in small pockets. Why? Managers discovered that there was more profit in mass marketting than in catering to the serious reader. So, more and more publications and news shows began to aim for mass market. But, without the leaven of the serious journals to pull the middle level media up, all that was left was the tabloid press, to pull it down.

From its foundation until the late 1960s, TIME Magazine was a midlevel news medium that strove to emulate the serious press. Then, management discovered that the small People section was the most popular in the magasine, so they expanded it. Then, they spun it off. Finally, they introduced its focus on celebrity and personality into their flagship publication. Meanwhile, People moved downmarket. This has been the trajectory for the whole news industry.

The defenders of the modern news media will tell you that they are responding to market forces. And, so they are, as long as the only market one considers worth responding to is the mass market. But there are other markets. One of the dangers of the movement to mass marketting is that, without at least some examples of other types of publications, the readers and listeners who used to make up these markets will, like the media, get dumbed down to the level of the material they can find.

The importance of a free press was not in the public's right to know all the salacious details of the latest sex trial or celebrity scandal. It was meant to guarantee that there would be no censorship based on unpopular political opinion, no state secrecy. Freedom of speech was not intended to foster the kind of tell-all culture it has created: it was meant to protect the person expressing an unpopular political or social stance. Together, they were to be the guarantors of an informed electorate that could adequately judge the performance ot thier elected officials, and vote accordingly.

How ironic that these two fundamental principles of democracy have become the greatest threat to democracy we face. For, make no mistake, without a genuinely informed electorate, democracy becomes no more than demagoguery.

Perhaps, it already is.