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citizens about politics, ranging from mainstream news and current affairs
through call-in programmes, talk shows, other hybrid infotainment formats, as
well as soap operas and dramas in realistic settings that highlight current issues.
Inasmuch as (1) television is the primary medium of political communication,
(2) television offers a cornucopia of diverse genres and programme types and
(3) uses and gratifications research has often spotted ‘surveillance’ and ‘reality-
seeking’ motives for viewing such programmes, the notion that only programmes
formally labelled as ‘informational’ should be regarded as legitimate outlets for
civic communication is unsustainable. Of course, whether all such programmes
actually do stimulate and inform their audience members, or whether some are
perniciously seductive (deflecting people from the ‘hard stuff’ as Brants puts it),
are still largely unexplored empirical questions.
A need to be open-minded about infotainment also arises from the strong
currents of populism that are suffusing the worlds of politics and the media
these days. They emanate from the expansion of media outlets, which ‘has
created new opportunities and pitfalls for the public to enter the political world’
(Delli Carpini and Williams, 1998). But they also stem from the decline of
ideology, leaving a sort of legitimacy gap that populism helps to fill; from the
growth of political marketing as an adjunct to campaign strategy; and from the
diminished standing of political, media and other elites in popular eyes. In such
conditions, paternalistic discourse is no longer an option. Communicators who
wish to inform and empower their auditors must therefore adapt more closely
than in the past to what ordinary people find interesting, engaging, relevant and
accessible. It is also important, however, whether such communicators actually
do wish to inform and empower or just want to grab eyeballs and sop up ratings.
And that is why it is worth holding on to our distinction, scorned by Brants,
between ‘simplistic’ and ‘deliberative’ approaches to populist political commun-
ication (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995: 221).
Brants’ belittling of our concern about the crisis of public communication is
also unhelpful. One can endorse the need for a balanced take on ‘infotainment’
without arguing that the crisis of public communication is not real and serious.
Does voter turnout of 36 percent in the recent US mid-term elections or a
historically low turnout since the Second World War at the last British General
Election not signify a serious problem about voters’ perceptions of and atti-
tudes towards politics? Is it implausible to associate the growth of electoral
indifference and cynicism with the advance of a communication process, in
which (to exaggerate a bit!) the ‘permanent campaign’ wears everybody out,
negative campaigning tarnishes everybody and campaigns that are heavily
mediated by journalists continually spotlight the manoeuvring of politicians for
publicity advantage?
So what forces are ultimately responsible for this state of affairs? Our
diagnosis of it was based on a longitudinal examination of changes that have
taken place in communicators’ approaches to television and in the sociopolitical
environment over the past quarter century. It is not a snapshot of the situation in
the last couple of years, and we never ascribed the crisis of public communication
to the coming of commercial television, as Brants alleges. Instead we traced its
sources to what we called the ‘dynamics of inter-communicator relationships’