For the past two weeks I've written about how the media -- part of the Fear Industrial Complex -- profit by scaring us to death about things that rarely happen, like terrorism, child abductions, and shark attacks. We do it because we get caught up in the excitement of the story. And for ratings.

Worse, because many reporters are statistically illiterate, personal-injury lawyers get us to hype risks that barely threaten people, like secondhand smoke, or getting cancer from trace amounts of chemicals. Sometimes they even con us into scaring you about risks that don't exist at all, like contracting anti-immune disease from breast implants.

Newsrooms are full of English majors who acknowledge that they are not good at math, but still rush to make confident pronouncements about a global-warming "crisis" and the coming of bird flu. Bird flu was called the No. 1 threat to the world. But bird flu has killed no one in America, while regular flu -- the boring kind -- kills tens of thousands.

Here's another example. What do you think is more dangerous, a house with a pool or a house with a gun? When, for "20/20," I asked some kids, all said the house with the gun is more dangerous. I'm sure their parents would agree. Yet a child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a gun accident. Parents don't know that partly because the media hate guns and gun accidents make bigger headlines. Ask yourself which incident would be more likely to be covered on TV.

Another is the illusion of control. People who fear flying are comfortable driving because they think they're "in control." Yet driving is probably the riskiest thing most of us do. Think about it: We drive at 65 mph, a few feet from other cars -- some of which are driven by 16-year olds! And our cameras have caught people curling their eyelashes and reading while driving. A hundred people die on the road every day. But the media are much more likely to do scare stories about plane crashes than car accidents.

So take our reporting with heavy skepticism. Ignore us when we hyperventilate about mad cow disease and the danger of asbestos hidden behind a wall. The media make it worse. Instead of educating people to real dangers, we scare them about things that hardly matter.

A drop-dead hysterically funny look at the go-to stories mass media uses when there's not enough hard news to fill a newspaper or a news broadcast. It's not media's fault per se, the main problem is that ads have been sold. You can't sell a blank newspaper full of ads, broadcast white noise bracketed by commercials, or expect people to visit a website full of ads with no content.

In early February, the lead story on CNN.com – "the most trusted name in news" – was about tattooed fish. Surely there were more important things happening in the world. I think there is a war going on somewhere. Is Social Security fixed yet?

Part of the blame lies with the 24-hour news cycle. Sometimes there just isn't anything substantial going on. But the mass media, like nature, abhor a vacuum. Journalists have developed proven techniques to fill it.

The good news is that every journalist I've talked to agrees this is a problem that's getting worse and they're not happy about it. They didn't go to graduate school to spend their time researching and writing about nuts who think Noah's Ark is visible from space on a mountain in Iran or what Brad Pitt thinks about stem-cell research.

Mass media aren't intentionally trying to dumb down the news, but there's no getting around the fact that nonnews types of articles are what drive ad revenue on the Internet. It's a subtle difference but an important one, because it removes intent as a motivation. Sadly, we still end up with the same result: bunk being passed off as news.

Sometimes, the revenue incentive in media produces hilarious results. Remember the girl who couldn't stop hiccuping this winter? ABC's "Good Morning America" representatives called her home 57 times in one day in a bid to book her for the show. Occasionally, though, you get horrific results, such as this past January when nearly every news outlet ran video of Saddam Hussein's execution ad nauseum for days. Apparently, snuff films are now OK for mainstream news.

So whose fault is all this, the media's or the public's? Both. Real news is simply not a ratings leader. Evening network news shows aren't shown during prime time because they can't hack it. This is also why prime-time news shows consist almost entirely of celebrity interviews and pedophile arrests. Note which type of "news" gets the better time slot.

It's looking more and more as though the age of impartial journalism was a temporary blip in history whose reign ended a few years ago when the Internet turned news consumption from all-inclusive (per newspaper) to a la carte (per story). My forthcoming book offers some solutions. Here's one: Split 24-hour news channels in two – one carries all the "Fark," the other carries all the real news. Revenues funnel into the same bank account; everyone wins.

Until that happens, news consumers will have to adjust to a world in which journalistic principles are being thrown out the window in a frantic quest for ratings. And mass media outlets need to make a call: Either report serious news or give up all pretenses.