Politainment

Abstract

Abstract The term politainment refers to the intertwining of politics and entertainment, and encompasses two processes: (1) political entertainment—how the entertainment industry exploits political topics in various entertainment formats; and (2) entertaining politics—how political actors capitalize on their celebrity (staging photo‐ops, party convention spectacle, talk‐show appearances, etc.) in order to enhance their images and to promote certain issues. When broadly defined, politainment moves beyond its association with infotainment to consider popular culture as a potential space for political insight and activity, and to acknowledge entertainment formats as sources of political knowledge, value orientation, and civic engagement. As a growing body of international scholarship attests, new hybrid media formats increasingly engage “political reality” across genres, conventional and new, in new television formats such as political satire and realityTV, fictionalized realism (in film, television, telenovelas, and interactive video games), and new variations of the celebrity media event genre. Such research recognizes that pleasures found in popular cultural formats of everyday life can also be ways of cultivating audiences' conscious motivations for political participation.

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