Should We Treat "Entertainment" News as News During a News Fast?

In a word, "Yes."

After all, entertainment news is still news, with many of the most wearying characteristics of other kinds of news--namely its bombardment of the audience with disconnected bits of information (and the Talking Heads' often asinine opinions about them).

However, there is also the reality of what that news consists in. Frivolous as that news often is, entertainment news is not so separate from the rest of the world that in following it along you do not expose yourself to the news more broadly.

For example, you look to see what people are saying about that recent Big Dumb Blockbuster, thinking that this is harmless enough. (It's not a war, after all, or a famine, or a natural disaster.) Yet even Big Dumb Blockbusters are apt to reflect reality in some degree--to be seen as commenting upon it in some degree, especially by those looking to find something offensive to their sensibility in everything. At the very least you expose yourself to the idiocies of the "culture wars," which have, indeed, made much of the content of the real news the argument about pop culture, including the stuff of Big Dumb Blockbusters, with this, in turn, becoming part of the entertainment news.

The result is that any really serious news fast will excise it from one's life--though frankly, given what much of this news consists in anyway, that really shouldn't seem like any great sacrifice for anyone really needing a break from the media culture surrounding us.