Page 131 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

INFOTAINMENT

programming. Examples of this would include ‘tabloid’ current affairs
programmes, as well as instructional or lifestyle formats such as
cooking, gardening and home improvement shows. Here, the term
comes to represent the means by which television is able to impart
information in an entertaining way.
In critical discourse, the concept is often used to lament the loss of
‘traditional’ news values. Those who criticise infotainment often have
a preference for modernist forms of communication, privileging
reason over emotion, public over private, and information over
entertainment. But the entertainment characteristics that inform
contemporary journalism were to be found in its earliest incarna-
tions. Sex, scandal, disaster and celebrity have been intrinsic to
modern journalism since the Enlightenment (Hartley, 1996), so the
shift to infotainment should not necessarily be considered a recent
event.
Broadcast news on television cannot avoid the need to entertain
and appeal to viewers. Capturing audiences is as much a priority for
factual programming as it is for fictional/entertainment genres, so it is
hardly surprising that over time news has borrowed characteristics
from non-news formats. Narrative, spectacle, personality presenters,
non-diegetic soundtrack and personalised address are all nowcentral to
the broadcasting of news in entertaining ways. The term infotainment
then could be said to recognise the porous nature of television and its
genres rather than a decline in the absolute values associated with
journalism.
At the heart of criticisms levelled at the move to infotainment is the
perceived damage to civil society, where citizens’ rights to rational
(political) discourse have been replaced by an influx of private (trivial)
affairs. To agree with this is to ignore the major movements that have
been able to gain visibility as a result. The environment, and issues
regarding youth, sexuality and ethnicity are all contemporary political
issues that have arisen outside of the traditional public sphere.
Infotainment, with its evocation of style, celebrity, gossip and
informality, provides a new space within which new paradigms of
politics can be discussed, represented and made meaningful.
Infotainment is also necessary in a medium where aberrant
decoding is the norm, because viewers have to be encouraged to
attend to things they do not like or knowabout when their
commitment to watching anything at all may not be high. In this
context, infotainment may not be dumbing down people who
would otherwise be reading The Financial Times,but taking

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