The Infotainment of Politics

Abstract

In the 1994 election, political parties and politicians in the Netherlands were, for the first time, confronted with a dual broadcasting system. New commercial stations joined the broadcasting landscape alongside the public broadcasting channels, which by law and tradition had very much functioned as a balanced platform for political communication. As a consequence of competition, one could expect politicians to focus their meda campaigning more on newly available “infotainment”- type programs, changing the conduct of politics. Nonetheless, a 6-week, around-the-clock content analysis of three public and two private channels showed that more than three quarters of politicians' television appearances were on the traditional informative programs. This article introduces criteria for an “infotainment scale” and a method for analyzing the degree of entertaining elements in different program genres, based on content, format, and style. It is concluded that all of the informational programs examined contained some elements of entertainment.

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