On the Art of Making Politics Cool…

Many authors in Europe and the USA claim that commercialization and competition in broadcasting lead to a downgrading of political information and, even worse, to a crisis in political communication highlighted by the increasing reliance of television news media on entertainment formats. The justification for this “infotainment scare” is put to the test by an overview of research on politics in television news in a number of (Northern) European countries, a first-hand research project on the campaign communications in the 1994 elections in the Netherlands, and a discussion of the implicit and explicit assumptions on which the scare is based.