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That's the way it was for much of the late, increasingly quaint age known as the 20th century — back when news was just news, not "information." And when information was still information, rather than potential raw material for infotainment and sometimes disinfotainment.

For much of that century, the whole idea of news was synonymous with a totemic New York City snapshot: Americans looking skyward, either jitterbugging in delight or paralyzed by grief as the zipper circling the old Times Tower spelled out unambiguous headlines in a slender necklace of lights. How simple life was for a news consumer in that bygone day. Only an obstinate, radical few doubted what the big stories were, or questioned the authority of the media reporting on them. An entire nation was on the same page, reading more or less the same front page, whether it was provided by a newspaper, a broadcast network or magazines like Time or Life. Nearly every informational crumb was available at a corner newsstand, with its overflowing bouquets of what was not yet ghettoized as "print."

That unambiguous clarity was smashed in the 1990's and replaced by a kaleidoscope of conflicting narratives. In the interlude of national restlessness that began with the end of the cold war and ended with the beginning of the war on terrorism, it became increasingly difficult for news consumers to tell the players without a score card. The signage in Times Square is itself a testament to the proliferation of information streams. The ticker on the former Times Tower (now run by Dow Jones) must compete with the gyrations of Morgan Stanley's and Nasdaq's multihued postings of financial stats, not to mention the double- decker ribbons of headlines at ABC's "Good Morning America" peep show and NBC's jumbo video screen, with its plugs for network stars more famous than many of their subjects. Information, our new entertainment, fittingly replaced even Hollywood and Broadway as the neighborhood logo. Information carries the heat and power of sex, moving Americans to panic and markets to orgasms (sometimes fake, sometimes premature) and driving White Houses berserk.

Amazing as it seems now, it's only as far back as the first Clinton administration that MSNBC and Fox News Channel didn't exist, that stock tickers were confined to brokerage houses and that only techies knew what Yahoo or Drudge was. The explanation for the arrival of the information age is simple enough: the rise of the Internet, the spread of multihundred-channel digital cable and satellite TV, and perhaps most important, the triumph of the new corporate megastate. For the first time, many major news organizations — including those of ABC, CBS, Time, CNN and Fox — are part of the same entertainment factories that produce movies, theme parks and video games. Some of these companies figured out that if you have 24 hours to fill on a new cable channel, it's much cheaper to do so with information that's in the public domain — news or otherwise — than by paying actors, writers and directors to make stuff up.

But if it's easy to see how and why our news environment has changed, it's far harder to measure the fallout on a population that can find no safe hiding place from the onslaught.

More information should be a good thing. An educated citizen, we're always told, is a democracy's most prized asset. The more competition in news sources, the better we'll ferret out the truth and keep the powers that be honest; the more voices in the news marketplace, the less likely that a mere handful of gatekeepers will monopolize civic debate, dictating what views are acceptable, what information gets through.

All true, up to a point. Today's media cover entire areas of news that were ignored before, from the frontiers of science to the most esoteric subcategories of culture. The porousness of the Internet has undermined both the thought-control machinery of totalitarian regimes and the propagandistic clout of corporations that used to have a far easier time suppressing unwanted news that might derail their stock price or their next Edsel.

But as we have also seen, the perils are inseparable from the breakthroughs. Early in the Clinton scandals, the ability of cable television and the World Wide Web to amplify any rumor whipped the country into apoplexy. In the run-up of the dot-com bubble, the same hyperventilation made and then gutted fortunes, inspiring novice stock investors to risk their savings on the basis of emotion gussied up as fact and "analysis."

This is what can happen when a news operation is just another profit center, considerably below a record label in value, within an entertainment corporation. The attributes of socko show business — fast pacing, celebrity, clear-cut heroes and villains, sex, violence and sentimentality — are diametrically opposed to those that should inform news judgment and reporting. If entertainment values rule, a new stock offering floated by two kids in a garage has to be transformed into the David that will surely vanquish a corporate Goliath. The public official who commits a misdemeanor is instantly elevated into a felon; the one who performs even a relatively trivial act of principle is immediately cast as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Even the weather isn't immune to gaudy, breathless packaging. Millions of dollars in needlessly canceled workdays were lost last winter when a nascent storm was inflated by television's meteorological drama queens into a Blizzard of the Century.