Policymakers are going to have to muddle through with careful and gradual re-openings of society. But a roundtable of wonky health experts concluding, “This is complicated, state governments are probably going to make mistakes, and a lot of people will be dissatisfied no matter what” does not make for particularly entertaining television — particularly given an audience that’s been conditioned for a few decades to expect every issue to be settled by a Team Red pundit and a Team Blue pundit going at it like a pair of Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots.

This isn’t entirely the fault of dim news producers, executives, and reporters. The American news media evolves in response to audience demands. The rise of the Internet meant people didn’t feel as much need to subscribe to a newspaper. They developed the expectation that news should be provided to them for free, on demand, in an easily digestible way at all times. That expectation in turn meant that much more of news institutions’ revenue had to come from advertising, which meant that the audiences had to be huge, which meant that the stories had to have as wide and simple an appeal as possible. And here we are.

Before the Internet, when a newspaper was sold, the only way a publisher knew what sections and stories got read the most was from commissioning reader surveys or reading letters to the editor. Once the Internet came along, every publisher could see exactly how many people read each article and feature, and it simply didn’t make sense to continue to invest resources in the sections that attracted the least readers, even if the coverage in those sections was an invaluable public service. To one extent or another, outlets all had an incentive to dumb things down and pitch as much of their coverage as possible to the lowest common denominator.