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108 Communication Theory & Research
We do see several examples of adaptation by the public news to the styles and
modes of presentation that one generally ascribes to the commercial channels.
Double presentations and ‘happy talk’, especially in daytime news, are not
uncommon with the public stations anymore. Moreover, the anchor person
begins to show star features and behave accordingly. From the archetypal ‘pillar
of wisdom and independence’, he or she sometimes enters the world of popular
culture, like the two main BBC news presenters who also host respectively a
reality television show and a quiz. Apart from the ‘talking heads’ of anchors,
moving pictures dominate all 17 channels in the eight countries Heinderyckx
(1993: 435) looked at, which made him conclude that the editors are apparently
afraid of boring the viewers. Hvitfelt (1994) notes for Sweden more of what he
calls ‘dramaturgically crafted’ techniques of story telling in the news. Together
with Bruns and Marcinkowski (1996) for Germany and Van Engelen (1997) for
the Netherlands, Hvitfelt also sees an increase of interviews with ‘the person in
the street’, as proof that identification for the viewing public is taken more into
consideration. Though contrary to Germany and the Netherlands, the Swedish
public channel focuses more on the ‘wielders of power’ and ‘spokespersons’. In
comparing Dutch and Belgian public and commercial stations, Canninga (1994)
concluded that the latter usually show shorter items, a tendency noticed
elsewhere too (Hvitfelt for Sweden). But according to Van Engelen the tendency
in the Netherlands is the opposite, as is the case in Germany: the items have
become longer and of a more narrative nature.
Although she found conflicting evidence for the hypothesis that German
public channels would follow commercial stations in their entertainment focus,
Pfetsch (1996) claims that in Germany ‘serious’ politics on television is reduced
to the traditional news format, while new genres have appeared that blur the
boundaries between political information and entertainment. With the fragmen-
tation of audiences, politicians feel more or less obliged to use all channels of
political communication available. In a separate study of news during the 1994
elections in the Netherlands, a colleague and I looked specifically at how politicians
adapted to the new, multi-channel situation and whether they did indeed aim
for more popular types of programmes.

Up and down the infotainment scale

In a six-week, round-the-clock content analysis of three public and two
commercial channels, prior to the 1994 elections in the Netherlands, we looked
at where the politicians of the different parties appeared on television (see Brants
and Neijens (1998) where this is reported more extensively). In total,
approximately 12,000 cases on Netherlands 1, 2 and 3 (public) and RTL 4 and 5
(private) were coded, as well as the name and the political party of the politician.
To get some idea of the degree to which politicians geared their television
appearances to the range of programmes available to the public, the amount of
attention to politicians was broken down according to seven programme genres:
news, (heavy) information (like discussion programmes and documentaries),