Summary
Contents
Subject index
Richly detailed and empirically grounded, this first book-length study of infotainment and its globalization by a leading scholar of global communication, offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of this emerging phenomenon. Going beyond - both geographically and theoretically - the ‘dumbing down’ discourse, largely confined to the Anglo-American media, the book argues that infotainment may have an important ideological role, a diversion in which ‘soft news’ masks the hard realities of neo-liberal imperialism.
The Infrastructure for Global Infotainment
The Infrastructure for Global Infotainment
How did this Americanized or American-inspired infotainment reach a global audience? It is crucially important to understand the creation of the infrastructure for global infotainment, which took place during the 1990s, when fundamental ideological changes in the post-Cold War global political arena and claims of the ‘end of history’ and the triumph of free-market neoliberalism were routinely bandied about in media and policy discourses. The creation of the ‘informational state’ (Braman, 2006) and pro-market international trade regimes, that included the media sector, transformed the global television landscape. The processes of deregulation and privatization in the communications and media industries, combined with new digital information and communication technologies, resulted in a quantum leap in television news channels. ...
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