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Who’s Afraid of Infotainment? 105

agenda setting, identifying the key issues of the day, including the forces
that have formed and may resolve them.
Platforms for an intelligible and illuminating advocacy by politicians and
spokepersons of other cause and interest groups.
Dialogue across a diverse range of views, as well as between power
holders (actual and prospective) and mass publics.
Mechanisms for holding officials to account for how they have exercised
power.
Incentives for citizens to learn, choose and become involved, rather than
merely to follow and kibitz over the political process.
A principled resistance to the effects of forces outside the media to subvert
their independence, integrity and ability to serve the audience.
A sense of respect for the audience members, as potentially concerned
and able to make sense of his or her political environment. (Blumler and
Gurevitch, 1995: 97)

That is quite a handful. But if media and especially public service television is to
bear some sense of ‘responsibility for the health of the political process and for
the quality of the public discussion generated within it’, their role is ‘pivotal’
(Blumler, 1992b: 1). Until the coming of the commercial deluge, the broadcasting
organizations in Europe had done a fine job, thanks to – ‘being creatures
ultimately of the state’ – their politicized structure. [...]
In short, Blumler (and he is not alone) is afraid of commercial television,
because its political communication is a mixture of information and
entertainment – politics as popular culture instead of the serious business of
popular discourse. And because competition forces public broadcasters to adapt
to the wishes of the (politically less interested) consumers, they will contribute
to the growth of the turned-off voter. It is a scary causal link which taps the life-
blood of democracy.
Blumler presents a convincing case for the dangers of infotainment, based on
decennia of reflection on the dynamics of change in European (notably British)
and American political communication. His study is embedded in a conviction
that system-based features of political communication give characteristic shape
to a society’s public sphere and his description of the changes he has noted over
the years is well stocked with examples from different countries. Empirical
support for content changes, however, is limited. And it is in this pudding that
the proof lies, of course – proof that can only come from longitudinal, cross-
national and cross-system comparison.
There is little of this, but in the course of this article I look at two obvious
domains of political communication to put Blumler’s claim to the test: television
news and campaign communication. The first rests on secondary literature
about the (changing?) place of politics in television news in different European
countries, the second on first-hand research on the infotainment orientation of
politicians and television journalists in the 1994 elections in the Netherlands.
Whatever the outcome, I contend at the end that much about the infotainment
scare is based on questionable premises.