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110 Communication Theory & Research
party differences over his campaign style, and the fact that he was named in a
fraud scandal, meant he had a lot of explaining to do and made him a prime
target for news and current affairs. The infotainment genres seemed to have lost
interest in the personal characteristics he so emphasized in the period prior to
the six-week election campaign.
Opinion polls long before election day had shown that the Labour Party
(PvdA) leader, present prime minister Wim Kok, had his own image problem:
both he and his party were seen as unreliable, uncaring and lacking in social
feeling, characteristics rather disastrous in a social democratic candidate. The
campaign team succeeded in changing Kok’s ‘technocrat’ image; their strategy
of avoiding the critical and conflict-oriented news programmes and the fact that
almost 40 percent of his television appearances were in talk shows must have
helped.
The two smaller parties – free market Liberal Party (VVD) and the socially
progressive Liberal Party (D66) – had more or less mirror problems. The leader
of the former party was considered a poor, far too high-brow communicator and
the party therefore opted for a campaign team in which prominence was given
to a popular former sportswoman. As it turned out, 15 percent of the total VVD
television appearances were in entertainment programmes, more than in news
and current affairs. When someone watched a VVD politician on television,
29 percent of the cases were during an entertainment programme. The D66 leader
on the other hand, was – being a great communicator and popular with large
segments of the public – in great demand with infotainment genres. As the polls
promised success, D66 could only lose in the campaign and they consequently
decided to play it more low key. Their politicians hardly appeared in
entertainment programmes, but they focused on informative programmes and,
for their leader, on talk shows.
The ‘infotainment’ of politics has, of course, potentially two sides. Next to
politicians aiming at more entertainment-focused programmes, genres
themselves can have changed. The ideal typical information–entertainment scale
described in the previous paragraphs is based on the role ascribed to mass media
in democratic theory, as discussed earlier in the article, whereby informative
programmes are considered to have content conducive to rational participation
in the political-electoral process; entertainment programmes are for distraction
and pleasure (thus assuming that politics is serious business and no fun).
Between the two ideal typical extremes of the continuum, however, a whole
range of subgenres has emerged, in which aspects of human interest, degree of
information, sensationalism, drama and entertainment have been mixed (Just
et al., 1996).
In covering the whole range of television genres in their political signification
process at election time, we combined topical content characteristics with style
and format elements and applied these to the information–entertainment
continuum. On the one side of the scale are the programmes with hard and
serious news, on the other the emphasis lies on taste, pleasure and lifestyle. On
the ‘serious side’ we could, with regard to topic, expect more factual content
aspects such as stories about party manifestos, policy, issues and party political
disagreements, while with regard to journalistic style politicians would be