Page 121 - Communication Theory and Research

McQuail(EJC)-3281-08.qxd 8/16/2005 6:32 PM Page 106

106 Communication Theory & Research
Entertaining news in the multi-channel reality

Following the infotainment hypothesis one might expect several changes in the
television news of those European countries that have had a strong public service
tradition: a certain degree of depoliticization, in the sense of less attention for or
marginalization of political news; a different, more populist picture of politics
through focusing on human interest, personalization and sensationalism in the
presentation of politicians and the political process – and these developments at
first more significantly so with commercial than with public channels, but (after
some time) the latter following suit.
Although extensive comparative and longitudinal European content analysis
of television news is very limited (Heinderyckx [1993] is a notable exception but
his comparison of 16 channels in eight countries focuses mainly on public
stations) and operationalizations of political news content in these research
projects differ markedly, separate country studies give a generally ambiguous
and sometimes contradictory picture of the ‘infotaining’ of news and of a
programmatic convergence between public and commercial channels.
Contrary to what one might expect, news programmes on the public channels
did not move to the periphery of or outside prime-time in order to compete with
popular drama on commercial television. On the contrary, most commercial
channels have followed the public schedule and seem to compete with public
broadcasters more on their ‘home ground’ than with different content and
formats. Hotelling’s Law of Excessive Sameness of Products, which claims to
show mathematically that in competitive markets it is rational for producers of
goods to make their products as similar as possible, might be one explanation for
this phenomenon (see Van Cuilenburg, 1997). Legitimizing the commercial
channel as a serious television station, and thus attracting the same, for
advertisers particularly interesting, audiences, has been another driving force.
Being an established commercial station might explain why in 1993 and early
1998 programme managers of Britain’s ITV suggested rescheduling the long
established News At Ten to 11 p.m. Growing competition, they claimed, forced
them to stretch the length of attractive prime-time entertainment programming.
Recent discussions on the BBC ‘dumbing down’ its coverage of Westminster
politics, though exemplary of anxiety over the more market-driven and
competitive approach of the public broadcaster, is based more on examples than
on longitudinal analysis of changes in its political output.
In most countries commercial television has not marginalized political news.
In eight West European countries, almost six out of an average of 13.3 items per
newscast in the early 1990s were about politics, with French TV5 (public)
broadcasting above the average and Belgian VTM and French TF1 (both
commercial) and French A2 and Italian RAIUNO (both public) broadcasting
below the average (Heinderyckx, 1993). In Sweden, where commercial television
has not yet got a real stronghold, Hvitfelt (1994) noticed that, overall, air time
devoted to politics declined sharply between 1990 and 1993.
Pfetsch (1996) and Bruns and Marcinkowski (1996) found, however, that both
public and commercial channels in Germany have increased their political
information in the news since the mid-1980s. Private channels have even doubled