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9 Political Communication

Systems All Change: a

Response to Kees Brants

Ja y G . Blumler

Almost everything to do with political communication seems to be in flux these
days: social formations and lifestyles; strategies of persuasion; politician–journalist
relations; and media technology, organization and finance. Critical in the last
sphere has been the shift from a situation where limited-channel, nationwide
television was the dominant medium of political communication, to a more
abundant and fragmented system, providing not only more outlets for political
messages but also more opportunities for audiences to ignore (or only cursorily
scan) those messages in favour of more sheerly enjoyable fare. Some observers
even suspect that the turbulent currents of change are ushering in a quite new
political communication order in place of the older one (Blumler and Kavanagh,
1998; Wyatt, 1998).
In ‘Who’s Afraid of Infotainment?’ (European Journal of Communication, 13(3),
1998: 315–35), Kees Brants casts a penetrating and challenging eye on one
consequence of these developments – the marked blurring of conventional
distinctions between media genres that set out to inform and those that entertain.
His approach is creative but raises certain issues that need further discussion.

Wherefrom infotainment?

The upsurge of new-found ‘infotainment’ springs from systemic impulses: the
exigencies of increased competition in multi-channel conditions; the exigencies
of tighter media finance, requiring news and current affairs producers to show
that they can earn their keep; and the tendency for many citizens to approach
politics more like consumers (instrumental, oriented to immediate gratifica-
tions and potentially fickle) than believers. Even in Britain, the birthplace of
missionary public service broadcasting, television today offers more slice-of-
real-life ‘docusoaps’ than analytically pedagogic documentaries; single-subject
current affairs programmes are being replaced by faster paced magazine
programmes; the main news bulletins have been cosmetically revamped; news
readers have become celebrities, paid and promoted as such; and the daytime

Source: EJC (1999), vol. 15, no. 2: 241–249.