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Who’s Afraid of Infotainment? 111

addressed with respect to their expertise or political involvement, as policy-maker
or expert, serious, from a certain professional distance, meant to inform and with
a tone of objectivity. The format would be business-like, no showy additions like
active audiences and accompanying music.
On the ‘entertaining side’ of the continuum we could expect topics with a
more human interest content in which politicians appear as individuals with
specific characteristics. Here, image and drama are more important than the
message, the latter being simple, preferably light hearted and with an emotional
under- or even overtone. The style would be more informal, personal and open,
in general: meant to entertain, instead of emphasizing independence and
critique. The format is entertaining, which could be both slightly sensational as
well as lightly dramatic. Audiences would participate actively and show
appreciation or dislike.
Infotainment is situated between the two poles and mixes political infor-
mative elements in entertainment programmes or entertainment characteristics
in traditionally informative programmes.
Analysing the topic, style and format of a number of programmes of both
public and private channels in the pre-election six-week period allowed us to say
something about the relative infotainment of political communication on Dutch
television during an election. We randomly chose 16 programmes of the seven
genres we previously distinguished in which one or more politicians appeared.
Due to classification differences with the People Meter this resulted in a rather
uneven distribution over the different genres, but still enabled us to compare
both genres and public and private channels. For each programme, the presence
of informative and/or entertainment characteristics was coded and attributed to
topic, style and format, resulting in scores ranging from ‘i’ (fully informative),
via ‘i/e’ and ‘e/i’ to ‘e’ (fully entertaining).
Almost all programmes we analysed had entertainment aspects (see Table 8.1),
in topic, style and format. Little attention was paid to policy positions of the
various parties and little or no attention to party political fundamentals, ideology
and electoral programmes. The campaign was mostly connected with conflicts
between parties and the consequences for possible coalition formation within the
context of the so-called horse race and hoopla. Although there are notable
exceptions with regard to style, the programmes generally followed the traditional
continuum. More so than in style, we see in the format a strong presence of
entertainment elements and more so with private than with public programmes.
On the whole, as to the information–entertainment scale, the picture is hybrid
though: a talk show may be more informative about the qualities of a candidate
than a news or current affairs programme is about issues and policies, and
private channel’s programmes are not necessarily more geared to entertainment
in their portrayal of politics than the programmes of the public broadcasters.

Coming to terms with popularizing politics

So, who’s afraid of the infotainment of politics? Certainly not only Jay G.
Blumler, who is treated here maybe a bit unfairly because his analysis of the