Analysis and opinion media content is outpacing news content and becoming a bigger and bigger part of the media landscape and our information consumption. Often beating out real news because traditional news has one particular and discouraging trait, it’s expensive to produce.

Why? Like the saying goes, “talk is cheap.” And analysis and opinion is essentially people sitting around talking.

As reality TV is fiscally attractive against scripted, production-intensive television programming, many media producers find it is often cheaper to put opinion and analysis shows on the air than actual news. News programming costs money. Costs get eaten up in travel, reporters’ salaries and research just to cover a story that only fills up a four-minute segment of a news program.

Plus facts aren’t copyrighted. Once you disseminate a fact, even one you paid a lot to gather, other news organizations can simply report on what you’ve just reported. So you sometimes spend money helping other media organizations get news.

On the other hand, with opinion shows, having a few people sit down and tell you what they think costs much less. And because those people can give shocking, head-turning opinions, types of opinions you might not get anywhere else, such shows with unique, distinguishable content or style often get better ratings.

That less-cost-more-ratings formula is why some former news channels have added more analysis and opinion shows to their lineup. Fox News has a daily line up. There’s opinion-flavored morning show, Fox and Friends, opinion-flavored business show, Your World with Neil Cavuto, as well as personality-driven opinion shows like Glenn Beck, The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity and On The Record with Greta Van Susteren.

MSNBC fills much of its daily programming with opinion-flavored shows, Morning Joe, Dylan Rattigan, The Ed Show, Hardball with Chris Matthews, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell and The Rachel Maddow Show. Even the shows on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News that claim to play it straight with the news are filled with pundits giving opinion and analysis.

The strain this puts on those trying to use good media literacy skills is there’s little news and fact content. In fact, the world of cable news opinion, lower-grade facts, claims, stereotypes, assumptions or conventional wisdom are permitted to be used to assert opinions or analysis statements. Information that would not be considered irrelevant in general news gathering (fact-free comments, unsubstantiated data, hearsay) tends to be admissible in the analysis and opinion conversation.

If you want an opinion or a sense of what other people are thinking, fine. But for good media literacy efforts, this makes drawing out facts from most of these shows like finding a needle in a haystack. And shows that, in terms of fact content, are marginally helpful. And pose danger that you walk away with someone else’s opinion that the ability to form your own. A situation that can create the situation I call mental obesity.

For more about this and to learn more about media literacy skills and avoid what I call mental obesity, read my book Does This News Make Me Look Fat? It’s available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the iBookstore.