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People love to accuse the media of having biases. Liberal bias. Conservative bias. Corporate bias. But these biases dim in comparison to the media’s biggest problem – the great profit motive.

The profit motive, prevalent mostly in local TV news programs, has been driving down the standard of news for years.

To prepare for this column, I subjected myself to watching the local nightly newscasts over the weekend.

In terms of substantive content, they were pretty bad. Some stories bore a stark resemblance to an episode of “The Simpsons,” where Bart rises to the top of a “Kid’s News” show by doing a series of meaningless human-interest stories called “Bart’s People.”

Because media outlets are businesses that have to create profits, they are forced to compete with one another for viewership. Unlike print media, whose audience is rather stable because it relies on a subscription base, television must cater to channel-surfing viewers with low attention spans.

How does TV media appeal to these viewers? By presenting news stories as dramatic narratives, not thought-provoking journalistic pieces. Television news coverage is sensationalistic and includes more and more “soft” human-interest stories that blur the line between entertainment and news.

As an example, here is a summary of the 5 o’clock CBS news from Sunday night. The first third of the show presented world, national and local headlines – including stories on same-sex marriages in Massachusetts and an escaped prisoner with a mug shot of a scary looking guy.

The second third of the show had a segment on sports and on weather. The last third of the show had a story on the shortening of the next season of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” a story on Jamie Foxx’s new movie “Breakin’ All the Rules” and an awful investigative reporting piece on how keeping cool this summer could be dangerous: What you need to know about electric fans.

After the newscast ended, I had this sad feeling that hundreds of thousands of viewers came out of it thinking about scary prisoners, the Lakers and killer electric fans.

To be fair, I watched the 6 o’clock CBS newscast to give it a second chance. It wasn’t much better. While it did have a great investigative piece on the possible misuse of taxpayer money in a downtown building purchase, it followed with a couple of really bad human-interest stories. One was about the Charles Manson murders in relation to a new made-for-TV movie about Charles Manson and the other was a frightening story about tips on how to escape abduction.

The abduction piece even had a dramatic reenactment complete with a scary, anonymous-looking bad guy dressed in black.

These CBS newscasts are illustrative of a problem that is pervasive throughout local newscasts. If you miss the regular show time for “Cops,” you can always tune in to KCAL 9 and watch an exciting police chase.

L.A. newscasts also have so much entertainment news coverage that you don’t even have to watch “Entertainment Tonight” or “Access Hollywood” anymore.

The line between entertainment and news has become so blurred that entertainers are now delivering our news to us.

Case in point is Jillian Barberie, former local Fox weatherwoman and current co-host of “Good Day L.A.,” a morning news program. Alongside these news programs, she has also hosted the “Extreme Dating” show, had a recurring role as “Foxy Levin” in Pamela Anderson’s “V.I.P.” show and had appearances on “Clueless” and “Beverly Hills 90210.”

With their greater focus on “soft” news stories, local television newscasts are losing sight of their journalistic role of keeping the public well informed. In-depth, substantive “hard” news is being sacrificed on the altar of sensationalism in the name of higher ratings. Something needs to be done to reverse the increasingly negative impacts of the profit motive on local news.

One option would be to increase public funding of new sources to help eliminate the profit motive. Publicly funded news outlets such as PBS and the BBC are renowned for providing far more substantive and in-depth coverage than their counterparts in the private sector.

Publicly funded news would still have its drawbacks though. PBS and the BBC are often accused of having a liberal bias. More importantly, it can be more difficult for news outlets to maintain freedom of the press when the government has control in their budgets.

On an individual level, L.A. residents need to realize local newscasts are not providing quality coverage of important issues. They can help by turning to other outlets such as print, online and national broadcast news. Maybe in the meantime, I can follow the lead of Bart Simpson and start my own series of meaningless pieces called “Mike’s People.”

Bitondo is a third-year political science and history student. E-mail him at mbitondo@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.