ABSTRACT
The familiar division of television’s programming into information and entertainment carries with it the implication that information is objective, true, educational, and important, whereas entertainment, by opposition, is subjective, fictional, escapist, trivial, and, frequently, harmful. Ultimately, information is judged to provide “good” television and entertainment “bad,” so to be entertaining comes to mean to compromise standards, to pander to the low. The logical extension of this simplistic opposition is that the final choice facing us is between good, accurate, responsible television that may be unpopular, and bad, compromised, irresponsible television that people actually want to watch.
