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ABSTRACT
Academic interest in what has been termed “infotainment” has grown considerably since the term was coined in the 1980s. Today, the burgeoning field of infotainment research has become an important interdisciplinary field of study producing numerous political, cultural, and social insights. Nevertheless, infotainment remains highly contested, multifaceted, and incoherent, both as a term and a field of study. Preliminary attempts have been made to give greater conceptual clarity and standardization to the term, although their success has been limited, leaving difficulties in analyzing and comparing findings in a unified manner. In this review essay I outline the findings from a comprehensive literature review by delineating three mains trajectories of infotainment research: (1) research on soft news programming; (2) research on traditional news media; and (3) research on media systems and global infotainment. To conclude, I offer three suggestions for future infotainment research, arguing that scholars should attempt to achieve standardization and conceptual clarity within, rather than across research trajectories, that political theory should be more explicitly incorporated into the literature for the purposes of standardizing methods and clarifying normative debates, and that research should also focus on the synergies between contemporary trends in political campaign/communications strategies and trends in infotainment.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 This review focuses on the most commonly-accepted forms of “infotainment” in the literature, including the news media and its increasingly-entertaining aspects, as well as “soft news programming” genres with considerable political content, such as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, various talk shows and “breakfast television,” etc. While some research, notably within the third approach to the study of infotainment outlined below, does incorporate more overt forms of “politically-relevant entertainment” such as film, docudramas, telenovelas, etc., these specific media are not focused on here, as they do not typically fall under the common definitions and conceptualizations of infotainment.
2 While there are no clear delineations regarding the limits of where this type of programming begins or ends, this research trajectory can be clearly distinguished from the study of “politically-relevant entertainment” such as films and more traditional television series that sometimes deal with political topics (e.g. The Simpsons or South Park). Soft news programming is a unique form of programming that fits the presentation of real-world information, current events, and political personalities into more entertaining formats.