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.
Global Circulation of 24/7 Infotainment
Global Circulation of 24/7 Infotainment
One key outcome of the globalization of television is that the US model of market-driven television news has been adopted or at least adapted, to suit local characteristics, across the globe. As Shoemaker and Cohen's comparative study of news shows, the nature of news and notions of newsworthiness in different countries are not that dissimilar around newsrooms and news audiences (Shoemaker and Cohen, 2005). This may be congruent with the broader shifts in media systems, from state to market, in evidence around the world, a result of changes in the political economy of the media, as outlined in the previous chapter. Examining media systems in different cultural and political contexts, Hallin and Mancini noted the ‘triumph ...
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