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Political Communication Systems All Change: A Response to Kees Brants 119

schedules are full of Oprah-like talk shows, including the infamous Jerry Springer
show.

Enter Kees Brants

How should scholars relate to this disconcerting trend? Will it drag down the
public service standards of European political communication? Is it ultimately
corrosive or restorative for engaged citizenship? Kees Brants makes three welcome
contributions to these questions.
First, he shows that it would be premature for civic-minded Europeans to
succumb to a full-blown panic over infotainment. After reviewing published
content analyses of the public and private television news services of several
European countries, Brants concludes that, in an admittedly mixed picture,
traditional standards are still largely being upheld. Public channels have not
moved the news to the margins or out of prime-time to compete with popular
drama on commercial television. On the contrary, commercial channels differ
little from the public schedules and seem to be competing more on terms set by
public broadcasters than with different content and formats.
Second, Brants offers a promising research tool, termed an ‘infotainment
scale’, for further investigation in this area. This codes programmes for the
presence of defined informational and/or entertainment characteristics in
respect of their topics, styles and formats, ranging in each case from ‘i’ (fully
informative), via ‘i/e’ and ‘e/i’ to ‘e’ (fully entertaining). When Brants applies
this scale to 16 programmes from seven different television genres that covered
the 1994 election campaign in the Netherlands, a hybrid but not dismaying
picture emerges. Although the programmes mixed the elements in varying ways
and degrees, Brants concludes that the evidence ‘does not point to infotainment
taking over’ (p. 329).
Third, Brants proposes a discriminating way to evaluate the emergence of
infotainment, depending essentially on whether it seems to be getting out of
hand. A trend to infotainment would be problematic, he suggests, if: (1) it became
the dominant form in which politics was portrayed; (2) it was used by politicians
to avoid the professional scrutiny of political journalists; or (3) it distracted
audiences from ‘the hard stuff of politics’. And Brants considers that as of now
these criteria are far from being violated in European political television.
But more needs to be said about four matters dealt with in Brants’ article.

Wherefrom the crisis of public communication?

First, why have some of us discerned in certain current trends the seeds of a
crisis of public communication (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995; Blumler, 1997)?
Here Brants misses the point. The nub of our concern is not the march of
infotainment, as he seems to suppose. I certainly have no quarrel with the
argument that there may be more than one way or one television genre to inform