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Who’s Afraid of Infotainment? 115

assumed irrational; and they turn the opportunity for access to information and
participation in politics, which lies at the heart of democratic theory, into an
obligation, and that begs for unwarranted disappointment.
The fear of losing the citizen and trading him or her for the consumer is based
on a distinction which seems to miss the point in thetelevision age. In political
communication, the affect of the supposed consumer should be taken as
seriously as the cognitive of the acclaimed citizen. The kind of vox-pop talk
show where politicians are confronted with live audiences is probably the only
public space where ‘ordinary people’ as ‘experience-based experts’ can put the
issues they deem relevant on both the media and the political agenda. Blumler
(1997), on the other hand, claims that it also tends

... to stage politics as spectacle and theatre and can suffer from glitziness and
shallowness. The upgrading of popular views often entails the downgrading
of expertise, and all too often populist programmes degenerate into bear pits.
The role of the studio audience becomes little more than that of providing a
range of conflicting views with minimal exchange, a process of argument-
hopping with some ideas cut off abruptly in mid-stream, a plethora of points
without structure. In short, communication-for-citizenship requires ‘deliber-
ative’ not ‘simplistic’ populism.

In this description of some forms of popular journalism, Blumler assumes at the
other side a kind of political journalism: with experts, intelligent and
comprehensible discourse based on exhange of arguments and people listening
to each other, and discussions that are placed in relevant contexts and that come
to conclusions, a kind of journalism that barely exists and, if so, only attracts an
audience usually limited to already-knows. The mixture of entertainment and
consciousness raising that is to be found in some talk shows could, on the other
hand, re-establish the popular in politics.
In societies where ideologies disappear and differences between political
parties become less and less important and visible, for the public much under-
standing of politics has the structure of narratives centred around individual
characters (Crigler and Jensen, 1991: 189). Under such circumstances, personal
characteristics of politicians are not unimportant and irrational elements in
choices and evaluations of politics. Personalization may also be an important
strategy for understanding political information and placing social issues in a
personal perspective. Democracy, as Dahlgren (1998: 91) has pointed out, is not
‘just about official politics, but also has to do with the norms and horizons of
everyday life and culture’. Civil society should not only include the discursive
and decision-making domain of politics but also the vast terrain of domestic life.

Note

1. The first results of a similar analysis of the 1998 elections point in the same direction: almost
80 percent of politicians’ television appearances were in the informative genres.