For the past dozen years, the traditional meaning of the early-February ritual called Groundhog Day has been joined by a less innocent connotation.

Now, when we think of "Groundhog Day," our thoughts might go beyond the story of a furry animal poking its head aboveground and indicating whether six more weeks of winter are in the offing. We may also think of a movie starring Bill Murray that evoked the monotony of repetitious daily life — especially the superficial stories that come around like clockwork in American news media.

Another Groundhog Day has passed, but we won't have to wait 360-odd days for re-enactment of the familiar that has become the predictable. Traditional news media have grown stale for many viewers, listeners and readers — a fact that helps to explain why the Internet has drawn so many eyeballs and ears in recent years.

Yes, the computer screen is apt to be "interactive" in a way that the customary broadcasters and print outlets cannot be. But the problems faced by marketers of time-honored news outlets go beyond the technical limitations of print, radio and television. We too often get the impression that we've seen just about all of it before.

Some very good journalism can be found in the most traditional media outlets. But it's layered in with a lot of content that can seem ritualistic to the point of smothering.

Coverage of politics, for instance, has been operationally defined as mainly involving coverage of politicians — and we all know how unpredictable they are. Coverage of politicians tethered to poll numbers is generally about as adventurous and exciting as coverage of artists engaged in painting by numbers.

I mean no disrespect to the hard-working journalists who provide us with a steady flow of useful information. But they're often in a rut — and, to a large extent, that means news consumers are, too.

Assumptions about what a "story" is — and is not — tend to severely limit the boundaries. Like groundhogs scared of shadows, too many news organizations seem to retreat from exercising their power as genuine First Amendment creatures. In a society accustomed to burying discussion of chronic inequities that involve gluttonous economic privilege in tandem with woeful economic deprivation, the free press has a responsibility to shake things up.

But the ritual is to skitter along the surface in a way that just kicks up some dust. Such sensational realms as sex, fashion, drugs, and stardom are big media favorites. With few exceptions, the storylines turn out to be notably similar — with genres of celebrity reporting that were pioneered by People magazine and have now spread far and wide through mainstream media outlets.

I wouldn't be surprised if most journalists — and most of their audience — often feel that they're on some kind of automatic pilot, with at least a vague sense of deju vu as they produce and consume stories that seem uncomfortably similar to previous stories. It's almost as though events are being contoured around patterns of coverage rather than the other way around.

But it would be wrong to simply pin such repetition compulsions on media institutions and the professionals who work for them. The timeworn character of their output both accentuates and reflects the extent to which deadening routines are afflicting our society as a whole.

Journalists have no more or less responsibility than the rest of us to approach each day with vitality. If news media make it easier for us to shuffle along in virtual re-runs of previous days, our failures to constructively disrupt the repetition are making it easier for news media to reinforce social passivity.

In the words of Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano, "the power system tells us that tomorrow is another word for today." Such messages, usually implicit, shadow us via routine media coverage. No wonder people so often get bored and yearn for something different.

Norman Solomon's latest book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," is now available in paperback. To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.