News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2008 U.S. Presidential election played out against the backdrop of two unpopular and deadly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a growing economic crisis spurred on by volatile oil prices and a meltdown in the sub-prime mortgage industries.Despite these trenchant problems serious policy discussions would have to wait.American broadcast news coverage clung to the now standard tropes: horserace politics, melodramatic narratives of triumph in the face of personal adversity, and imagined political gaffes relating to lipstick on pigs.It is a commonplace of media criticism to suggest that political coverage is superficial.Some would argue it has been ever thus.Notwithstanding these claims, there has been a growing cultural-studies literature in recent years arguing that popular media, from tabloids to daytime talk shows such as Oprah, create spaces in which marginalized social actors are given voice and where vernacular forms of representation are afforded equal play alongside so-called elite discourse.News as Entertainment enters the fray by suggesting it is time to move beyond the debate about the "dumbing down" of popular culture.Daya Kishan Thussu is concerned with what he calls "global infotainment," which he defines as "the globalization of a USstyle ratings-driven television journalism which privileges privatized soft news-about celebrities, crime, corruption and violence-and presents it as a form of spectacle, at the expense of news about political, civic and public affairs" (p.8).His is an argument about diversion; as such, the book is part of a long line of both conservative and radical criticism that associates entertainment with distraction and passive spectatorship.The book is a logical outgrowth of the work Thussu has produced over the past 20 years in the fields of international relations, and global news broadcasting.He argues that the globalization of market-driven news has helped to construct a "media ecology" saturated by infotainment.Moreover, he asserts that infotainment has colonized and displaced public-service broadcasting and with it public consciousness.Global infotainment is a massive diversion that "masks" a neoliberal agenda promoted by "infotainment conglomerates."The book begins by mapping the historical evolution of news and entertainment, from the early broadsheets to today's 24/7 cable news networks.Thussu pays particular attention to the contrasting models of for-profit television and public service broadcasting (PSB), pioneered by the BBC.PSB, the dominant model throughout post-war Europe, was eventually undermined, he argues, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global triumph of capitalism.Neoliberal hegemony led to the privatization and commercialization of PSBs along the lines of the now dominant market-driven American model.This process was aided by active state involvement through deregulation and the technological convergence of television, telecommunication and computing.Echoing the warnings of the late media critic Neil Postman, Thussu argues that the pervasive commercial logic shared among broadcasters creates a need for entertaining programming above all else.Soft news, lifestyle and consumer journalism abound.But Thussu does not stop here.He goes further to make the much stronger claim that the proliferation of crime, scandal and celebrity gossip has become "a conduit for the corporate colonization of consciousness, while public journalism and the public sphere have been undermined" (p.11).The book's strength is found in its historical approach and the empirical evidence
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it