The public sphere has become too commercialized. This is a common complaint about the public culture we now consume in Western countries — that in search of profits, the media no longer care about quality (Thompson, 1990: 112–113). They sell whatever people will buy, without any other considerations. This leads them to produce only what consumers think they want, rather than what they actually need. They aim for ‘the lowest common denominator’; they make ‘trash’; they produce ‘vulgar’ or ‘downmarket’ or ‘Americanized’ or ‘tabloidized’ material (see Lumby and O'Neil, 1994: 151; McNair, 2000: 2). They provide coverage of public events in terms of concrete experiences and individual personalities rather than structural issues and abstract concepts. They don't use complex language, but ‘dumb down’ their content for uneducated consumers. They use a vocabulary which is vulgar and irreverent. They don't show respect to experts. They produce material which is easy to consume, not requiring audiences to think at great length about what they're given; they use lots of pictures and layouts with large headlines rather than relying on the written words to communicate. They avoid serious politics and focus on human interest, sport and celebrities — and they do all this because this is what people buy, and the profit motive is all they care about. In short, in trying to reach large audiences, the public sphere has been corrupted by ‘sensationalism’ — produced to ‘arouse intense interest …’ (Shattuc, 1997: 19); ‘subject to the influence of … factitious emotion’ (OED) — drowning out serious, detailed, quality discussions (Murdock, 1992: 23).