Unit V -the Media and Social Capital
Infotainment
News
as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment. By
Daya Kishan Thussu. London, Sage: 2007
Dr Stephen Stockwell ,Reconsidering
the Fourth Estate:The functions of infotainment
Traditional TV news and current affairs
programs are shrinking in terms of audience reach and thus significance to
public discourse. The challenge to these traditional forms comes from an
emerging, still-formless genre, and infotainment.
News entertainment, or “infotainment,” has come to
dominate the news landscape in recent years, despite being sharply scorned by
many traditional journalists and academics for focusing on “entertainment”
rather than “news.” Increasingly, news programs have tried to make their
broadcasts more “entertaining,” to gain ratings by incorporating more
lighthearted presentations, human interest stories, and emotionally-tinged or
charged language into newscasts.
Who
consumes infotainment, how it is consumed, and what effects the rise of
infotainment has had on the general population’s conception of news?
Some
have argued that infotainment increases interest in the politics, and therefore
participation in democracy
“News
personalities,” better known as “pundits,” now dominate the journalistic
landscape. The likes of Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, CNN’s Glenn Beck, and MSNBC’s
Keith Olbermann, NDTV- Burkha Dutta, Times NOW Arnold Goswamy, CNN-IBN Karan
Thappar, presenting themselves as newscasters and anchormen, now rule an
environment once dominated by Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.
Thomas E. Patterson, a government professor at Harvard has noted that we are
seeing the rise of soft news, a “more personality-centered” medium in which the
newscaster has become as much a part of the news as the news itself.
Infotainment, then, is the portmanteau of information and entertainment. Its
focus is human-interest issues, violent crime, and other topics where a public
policy component is not wholly central to the story.
Another
crucial component of infotainment is its reliance on what is best understood as
a dialogical format. According to Eran Ben-Porath, professor of Communication
at the Annenberg School in Philadelphia, “cable…delivers the news predominately
by way of human interaction based on conversation rather than journalistic
monolog.” Unlike the answers-based format of more “traditional” newscasts, news
presented in a dialogical format reports through questions and projected
solutions often gathered from popular opinion polls, on the spot surveys and
interviews with populist commentators asked to weigh in on the day’s issues.
Crucial to this formula is the almost constant sense of urgency that
accompanies the appearance of these polls, testimonies and rants. This means
that news is broadcast live, not pre-taped.
Following
from this, infotainment is also characterized by its tendency to be
specialized. As modern media has diversified to include the Internet, satellite,
extended cable and twenty-four hour news networks, “there are more channels,
chances, and incentives to tailor political communication to particular
identities, conditions, and tastes.
This
results in a political fragmentation, where political agendas appear in
multiple, if often non-dedicated, channels aimed at particular audiences. This
can largely be explained by the increasingly market-driven nature of the
journalism industry. As corporations focus increasingly on cashing in on niche
demographics, the information industry has sought to tailor news to particular
aspects that will create viewer loyalty. Assuming that audience attention is
“fickle” and that programs are chosen “on subject matter, personal
relevance, and convenience,”viewers are comforted by a market environment in
which they are able to access and are provided with information that conforms
to a familiar state of mind.
This
is especially interesting when one considers that the majority of
infotainment’s audience consists of people who do not consider themselves as
traditionally engaged in politics. Matthew Baum, professor of Journalism at
Harvard, defines these consumers as “politically inattentive individuals,” who
do not “turn to traditional political news, and so are unlikely to be exposed
to hard news stories about foreign affairs.” Infotainment, instead, utilizes
simplified information that allows citizens to participate in democracy from a
largely populist base where information is insubstantial and the coverage is
not in-depth. Both Baum and Angela Jamison, professor of Journalism at UCLA,
argue that politically inattentive viewers do not decide whether to use hard or
soft news, but rather decide whether to use soft news or no news at all.As
such, soft news is less an alternative news source which offers a world view
that might challenge conventional news outlets, as it is a substitute primary
news source for millions who do not want to or have the time to absorb what
might be considered a complicated, detailed news story. Infotainment serves as
a system of reporting that allows viewers to get just enough information to be
able to take some sort of stand on a given issue. If political information can
be made entertaining, it can be tacked onto the material mainly intended for entertainment.
As a result, there is no extra cost for gaining this information. In the end,
consuming soft news does actually raise awareness about political issues in
people with low political awareness.
Viewers
watch infotainment because its stories are presented in an episodic format that
helps simplify otherwise complex information. People who depend on infotainment
often find the information given in hard news broadcasts complex and hard to
comprehend. Episodic frames, on the other hand, “tend to be more compelling and
accessible to politically inattentive viewers.”An episodic focus on individuals
or groups rather than on public policy issues, is easier to connect to as a
viewer, and thus easier to digest. Baum also asserts that “individuals may
rapidly forget the facts surrounding a given issue or policy, yet they remember
how they felt about it.” Within the framing of episodic news, emotional
judgments take place over slow and distanced reasoning. One of the starkest
examples of this remains the events of 9/11; many people may recall where they
were when they found out and their initial shock. As 9/11 demonstrated,
the visual component of news reports becomes imperative to the impact of soft
news because “it is more vivid” and plays to viewers’ preference for episodic
frames. Families crying at memorial services and Bush using harsh rhetoric
against those allegedly responsible can provoke strong emotional reactions,
even if they have nothing to do with a policy component or looking into why
9/11 occurred. If soft news viewers can visualize events and issues through a
set image rather than making an image themselves through reports and dictated
analysis, it is more likely to keep their attention fixed on a story, replacing
thought with anticipation and a sense of participation.
Fox’s
“The O’Reilly Factor
Cool and Hot media
McLuhan
placed media into two categories: Hot and Cold.
He
determined a mediums temperature based on the involvement or participation from
the masses and the amount of information presented. From his book Understanding
Media:
"There
is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one
like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A
hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition".
High definition is a state of being well filled with data. A photograph is,
visually, "high definition". A cartoon is "low definition,"
simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool
medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of
information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little
is given and so much has to be filled by the listener. On the other hand, hot
media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot
media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in
participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium
like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the
telephone."
Some
examples given by McLuhan are:
COOL HOT
telephone -radio
speech -print
cartoons- photographs
television -movies
seminar- lecture
It seems,
the key to understanding this concept is to explore how the content is
presented by the medium. Or in other words, how does the medium express itself.
Both telephone and speech are cool in nature because of the economic means of
language, while the radio is filled with noise, to be always "on".
A
movie and television differ from involvement. The movie, or film, is blown up
millions of times greater than its original size giving the viewer all the
information on the screen, and so one does not need the imaginative faculty to
see what is happening. While the television has low information, cutting away
to advertising, returning for the sponsored viewing. All the breaks are
programmed, sending the viewer into an acute state of involvement.
It
is the hot medium that has little participation from the audience due to its
high definition of sense. While the cool medium is low in definition, and
therefore one must be more involved to "get it". A cool medium, then,
can become intensified at some point by evolving its structure, either through
hybridization (marriage to another medium) or "heating up" a
particular sense from which one was cool. For instance, you might see the
television heat up pretty soon as it marries the computer monitor, and/or smart
phones. The antenna and satellite are mobile. The display becomes the focus of
attention and it matters less what one is watching, so much that they are
watching. Further, the content provided are clips, bites, moments, skits, blips
and slices of life from reality or performance artists, creating a new stage
keeps people remote and in observation
