Over the past day or two, I have rather cynically shook my head at people taking to Facebook, Twitter, etc. to decry the proles’ shallow fixation on the latest Justin Bieber news—something about eggs and drag racing—to the apparent exclusion of more important concerns.

I generally figure that people’s preference for bread and circuses is a persistent feature of society, and has been since we first started having societies—and with them, issues of societal importance for people to ignore. Then I saw this headline, and decided it’s worth being at least a bit annoyed: “Watch a congresswoman discussing the NSA get interrupted for ‘breaking news’ on Justin Bieber’s arrest.”

The extremely cynical and conspiracy-minded among us might think that this was a deliberate distraction, orchestrated by the network or even by a government that only pretends to be just marginally competent. I, on the other hand, am thinking this was more likely to have been a combination of unfortunate timing and a hasty programming decision.

Would they have interrupted a report on, say, one of the Kardashians to report on Bieber? Who the hell knows? The fact is that Bieber seems more like news than the NSA to whomever runs these shows, and that’s more likely to be because they think more people will tune in for Bieber. In that sense, I guess I join those who bemoan the hoi polloi’s fixation on seemingly trivial entertainment news (more on the idea of triviality below.)

That said, even if they didn’t cut away, I’m not holding my breath for any extremely hard-hitting NSA exposés from most of the media. To a very large extent, the NSA is getting its hands on data that we willingly give up to media companies every day. That’s not to justify anything the NSA is doing or has done, but we most likely have even less say over how these companies use our data than how the government uses it. They probably know that people care more about Bieber because they’ve collected data on how many times people have played his tracks and on what devices. You would be amazed at what they know about us.

To look at the Bieber story a different way, a rich white kid has been arrested for alleged criminal wrongdoing. Sad as it may be, that qualifies as news in this day and age. Of course, the alleged criminal acts involve property damage, booze, and unsafe driving, not collateralized debt obligations or securities fraud, so there’s that.

Photo credit: By WolfgangRieger [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.