Wherefrom infotainment?

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 gratifications 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 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.