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.
A Global Infotainment Sphere?
A Global Infotainment Sphere?
Despite the unprecedented growth of infotainment programming on a global scale and its capacity to help legitimize neo-liberal media and communication regimes, disjunctures and dissonances are appearing which offer possibilities for resistance to the new version of Western imperialism, discussed in the previous chapter. In both economic and geo-political terms, new configurations of power are emerging. The economic recovery and upturn in Russia under President Vladimir Putin and the resultant assertiveness from the Kremlin has global reverberations; China's double-digit economic growth and the extension of its influence in parts of the developing world, especially Africa, once the preserve of Western-based corporations, is reorienting the global economy. The globalization of service industries is changing the ‘geographies of global trade’ ...
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