If 59 percent of America's youth know the names of the Three Stooges, what percentage knows who Shemp is?

This essay presents the crux of an issue the class debated earlier in the year: Should news outlets be covering what their audiences want to read or what they think they should know?

I come down firmly on the side of the latter. There is a place for celebrity news and other topics that are considered “soft,” the topics in which a good portion of today’s readers are interested.

But that place is the inside pages or the entertainment section. It has no place side-by-side with the stories that are crucial for the readers’ understanding of their lives and communities.

I don’t want to say that news outlets know better than their readers what needs to be known, but in some cases, they do.

Cornog uses the example of the Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal. He said that the Post received numerous letters from readers telling the paper to drop it because they didn’t want to hear about government corruption.

What sort of precedent would it have set if Ben Bradlee had told Woodward and Bernstein to leave the story be in an effort to court some more readers? A dangerous one. You might not want to think about a cancerous tumor, but I’m sure you’d want to know it was there.

And I’m glad that somebody finally called out the Redeye, because it makes me sick. This paper barely ever uses pieces by staff writers, opting instead to pull pieces from Tribune papers or wire sources and puts celebrity news (copious amounts of it) interspersed with a sprinkling of things that actually matter.

After North Korea tested its (possibly) nuclear weapon in October, the Redeye had a profile of Kim Jong Il titled “Lil Kim,” also the name of a female rapper (clarification intended for those not as hip as I). This is belittling a man that our president says is a big part of the Axis of Evil. This is what people want?

I’m part of the generation the Redeye caters to, the same generation Cornog says we need to be worried about. And I’m inclined to agree with his bleak assessment of our pettiness and apathy to civic duties.

He offers the peace and prosperity of our upbringings and contrasts it with the hardships of earlier generations to explain this, which I think is true to some extent. But if an entire generation of Americans can be this easily swayed by celebrity news and anything advertised as “extreme” (spelled “xtreme,” of course), then there’s probably something a little deeper going on.

Maybe we’re just damaged.