A New Standard of News Quality: Burglar Alarms for the Monitorial Citizen.

Public affairs reporting in the United States has never been impressively sophisticated and, under the pressure of market-driven competition, it has now gotten noticeably softer and less informative. This has led thoughtful commentators to worry whether citizens can get sufficient information from the news to discharge their duties as democratic citizens. This paper argues, however, that these doubts are grounded in a standard of news quality that makes unnecessarily heavy demands of citizens. The paper proposes a less stringent and arguably more realistic standard of news quality, which it calls the Burglar Alarm standard. The key idea is that, following a paper by Mathew McCubbins and Thomas Schwartz, the news should provide information in accord with the principle of attention-catching "burglar alarms" about acute problems, in contrast to hum-drum "police patrols" over vast areas that do not pose immediate problems. In some respects, today’s market-driven soft news acquits itself well by this standard. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]