Information intended for mass consumption must appear minimally relevant for it to have mass appeal; its boundaries of plausibility must be publicly reasonable to have an impact in the public sphere. Mass media is closely linked to the public sphere, for news information, by necessity, is produced and consumed either with reference or with inference to the public’s “historical memories” of itself.
As time passes from the moment of an event, information produced about that event moves along an asymptotic curve, its relevancy progressively decreasing yet never reaching zero (or else the memory would cease). A strong correlation therefore exists between high relevancy of information and its referential quality; on the other hand, information becomes more inferential as it becomes less relevant. At some point in time information becomes conventional wisdom, the taken-for-granted background knowledge to which news and political discourse refers increasingly over time.
