It might seem outlandish, but we may currently be enjoying the optimal period of mass media benefits. Not long ago - certainly within the embrace of my childhood - media were inefficient, excessively formal and dull.
Most newspapers presented rows of forbidding type and broadcast media were too weighed down by technical limitations and public service considerations to offer much of either excitement or choice.
News was, generally speaking, what someone in authority wanted you to hear, a kind of undeclared advertising interrupted by the odd murder or kidnapping, these too reported sparsely and in accordance with strict conventions.
Nowadays, you might precipitately decide, such restraints have been thrown to the winds, and like me you may both welcome this liberation and regard it with a degree of trepidation on the basis of the excesses of what we used to call "the tabloid media" - before that term became, firstly, tautologous and then meaningless.
But consider that the media we berate and consume in equal measure may, at more or less this precise moment, be achieving approximately the best of their informational and democratic potential. I say this less in praise of the present than in acknowledgment of how bad things used to be and in anticipation of how much worse they may get.
Consider that most things you read in your newspapers at the moment are, in some sense, not entirely untrue. Consider further that, from what we observe of the drift of media, the day is coming when this fleeting moment will seem an oasis of journalistic ethics and restraint.
Three stories running at present carry portents of future reality: the Madeleine McCann disappearance, the Princess Diana inquest, and, at home, the saga of Bertie and the Mahon Tribunal. All three are relatively lacking in hard factual content, but persist at a level of senationalism by virtue of some as yet under-noticed additional factor. In one, all that is known is that a child has been missing for five months and that nobody can or will say what happened. Out of this has been created the most incredible soap opera ever seen, in which the locus of villainhood has shifted as though to a script by Agatha Christie on crack-cocaine. Of the death of Princess Diana we know that she was killed in a road crash - terrible but banal. Ten years later, the "story" of her demise becomes ever more fanciful, involving an undeclared pregnancy, a kamikaze driver, disabled CCTV cameras and finely-calibrated plots engineered by transnational spooks.
News has ceased to be what happened, what is true, what is known, and has become the purveyance of possibility, however remote.
Journalism, increasingly, is driven not by events but by the imperatives of the headline. Today's headline may well be true, but only accidentally, and is justified by neither accuracy nor plausibility but by the necessity to shift units. Tomorrow's headline will overtake, or correct, or refine it, so its truth or otherwise doesn't matter. Only the naive and humourless expect any of it to be other than diverting.
It will, if you can forgive the implicit judgementalism, get worse. Commercial pressures and the licence devolving from an internet culture of paranoid invention are creating a model of media in which what matters is not what happens but what can, however implausibly, be inferred from the known facts.
For the next six months, the Princess Di inquest will spend most of its time on hypotheses which will sound like they originated in the light-deficient brain of web-junkies alternating between paranoid blogging and interludes of auto-eroticism. In the end it will decide that Diana died in a traffic accident, but each hare-brained angle will have been reported with unwavering certainty.
Real life, obligingly, now replicates this heaving landscape of one part fact, nine parts speculation. Intoxicated by tabloid hyper-focus, the Portuguese police ran the Madeleine McCann investigation as though to a Pink Panther script. Chief Insp Goncalo Amaral, fired as leader of the investigation last week, might be forgiven for wondering why it suddenly became problematic that he was shouting his latest hypothesis at the nearest reporter. For 150 days he gave the media their daily fix of plot-twists, suspects, clues, forensic conundrums and theories, and then himself became a casualty of the need for plot development.
A similar write-out awaits Bertie. The lack of evidence of wrongdoing is neither here nor there. Soap has no need of smoking guns. Subtext is all. The "story" is driven not by a concrete ethic of truth, justice or accountability, but by the impending (self-declared) obsolescence of the main character and the endless possibilities for speculation.
The Mahon tribunal and the media claim to pursue "the facts", but really their pursuit is itself the story and can have but one conclusion. The Taoiseach will be "caught", most likely not by evidence but because his leadership will have become so gummed up with innuendo that even his best friends will tell him that continuing in the teeth of the omnipotent scriptwriters is futile.