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Who’s Afraid of Infotainment? 107

political references in news stories, putting it almost at a par with public news.
In looking at the total programme supply in Germany of two public and three
private channels over a four-week period in 1995, Kruger (1996), however, found
a substantial difference: the former had on average 27 percent political infor-
mation in its programming (out of a ratio of 42 percent information), the latter
just over 5 percent (with PRO 70 percent; out of an average of 13 percent infor-
mation). Apparently, if they do it, commercial channels restrict their political
information mainly to newscasts.
In Denmark Powers et al. (1994) did not find much distinction between the
news of the public DR-TV and the commercial TV-2; they even claim that
commercial competition has led to more varied news from more sources, but
their research was not longitudinal. Van Poecke and Van der Biesen (1991), on
the other hand, found a marked difference in political news content between the
Flemish public BRT and the commercial VTM (23 and 16 percent respectively).
For the Netherlands, Van Engelen (1997) found an increase in national political
items of the public NOS news between 1990 and 1993 from 23 to 32 percent,
while the commercial RTL news remained at around 17 percent over that same
period. Van Praag and Van der Eijk (1998), in looking at Dutch campaign news
at three consecutive elections (1986, 1989 and 1994), noticed a marked decrease
of politically informative news with the public channel and, alternatively, an
increase of campaign rituals and horse race between 1986 and 1994. The decrease
of political information set in, however, long before competition started in 1989,
when the first commercial station was introduced in the Netherlands.
According to the infotainment hypothesis we can expect a growing
importance of sensationalism and human interest, following the example of the
tabloid press that we find in several European countries. Again, the picture is
ambiguous, though tabloid television news – the car, star and royalty chasing
format that we know from local television in the US – is still practically absent in
Europe, including most private channels. Where for the European countries as a
whole we might see a slight tendency towards a popularization of news, there is
little evidence that politicians and politics are dramatically more personalized
and sensationalized than before.
In Belgium (Canninga, 1994), Sweden (Hvitfelt, 1994) and Denmark (Powers
et al., 1994) there is evidence towards more sensationalism in news reporting as
a whole (in choice of items: more crime news, and/or in news angle and visuals)
as well as more ‘soft’ news. For Germany Kruger found in 1995 that the three
commercial channels had on average 37 percent of what he calls ‘boulevard’
news – crime, drugs, catastrophies, sexual abnormalities – against 7 percent for
the two public channels. Bruns and Marcinkowski (1996) note, however, that
between 1986 and 1994 human interest and violence items in the commercial
news dropped to the same level as the public channels. Using Nimmo and
Combs’s (1985) distinction between on the one hand elitist/factual news and on
the other populist/sensationalist, Van Engelen (1997) claims that between 1990
and 1996 almost all items of the commercial and the public news he looked at
fitted the first category. However, in tackling declining advertising income, the
managing director of Dutch RTL in 1998 not only cut the news budget, but also
suggested the news be made more ‘juicy’.