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8 Who’s Afraid of Infotainment?

K ees Br ants

When, on the eve of the 1994 elections in the Netherlands, parliamentary
candidate and future Minister of the Interior Hans Dijkstal put his saxophone to
his mouth, closed his eyes and played the first tunes of a bluesy ballad, the local
pundits of political communication who watched the entertainment show on
television first laughed their heads off. Here was a free market Liberal who had
been watching too many American election campaigns, notably Bill Clinton’s in
1992. But to be honest, he did not do too badly. It wasn’t Elvis Presley’s
‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and the Dutch host was a far cry from Arsenio Hall, but Hans
Dijkstal knew how to play and certainly thrilled the studio audience that had not
come for heavy-handed political talk. And he reached a good size audience at
home as well, many with little political interest, and all potential voters.
After the laughter had died down, the same commentators were quick to
exclaim that commercialization had now come to the Low Countries. The dykes
had apparently been unable to stop the flood of ‘Americanization’, they
lamented as latter-day Hans Brinkers. They did not explain what the label
exactly meant, but it was obviously no good and a violent contrast with the
serious attitude with which they thought politics should be approached. And
later they dwelt upon the good old days, when public broadcasting still had a
monopoly and when everyone seemed to agree that commercial television was
something that the Americans should keep for themselves – in short, the days
when political communication was still meant to inform about issues and points
of view and not to entertain with personalities and images.
The pundits must have suffered a memory loss in linking the coming of
commercial television in the Netherlands (1989) with infotainment elements that
supposedly characterize American-style television. Already in the 1970s a prime
minister and a prime minister to-be had used a talk show in their campaigns.
A predecessor of Hans Dijkstal was interviewed in a sauna, dressed in a towel
barely hiding his substantial size. Commentators with a better memory recalled
many an occasion where politicians – obviously expecting to find the floating
voter – had not shunned the entertainment programmes of the public
broadcasters. They might not always have been at ease (one prime minister
radiated exuberantly in 1981 when being interviewed and half ridiculed by a
Dutch comedian), but they felt it was part of the game.
These examples of what would now be called ‘infotainment’ only prove, of
course, that the phenomenon is not new in the Netherlands; andI am sure every
country in Europe has its own historic examples. The question is whether

Source: EJC (1998), vol. 13, no. 3: 315–35.