Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The twentieth century, with its new forms of mass production and mass media, gave rise to what has been called consumer society, a world largely concerned with personal gratifications and desirable selfhood gained through consuming goods and experiences. An essential part of this new “amusement society” has been a focus on entertainment from watching television sitcoms to attending sport events, various rock concerts, or the symphony. As mass-mediated entertainment became a growing industry, there was a proliferation of cable programming and cable news outlets, greater fragmentation of audiences, and a growing concentration of ownership. Thus the gathering of “hard news,” reports of breaking events of war and peace, prosperity and poverty, leadership, public affairs, or investigations of crimes became highly expensive, producing little revenue and ever less audience share. These various factors led to the erosion of barriers between reporting “hard news” and the production of “soft news” combining information and entertainment to produce “infotainment,” pleasantries about people, places, or events which provide the viewer with an agreeable form of entertainment “that is unrelated to public affairs or policy, and is typically more sensational, more personality or celebrity oriented, less time-bound (meaning that the traditional journalistic norm of “timeliness” does not apply), and ... log in or subscribe to read full text