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Infotainment: A Twilight zone

a
Gill Branston
a
Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies , Swansea
Institute of Higher Education
Published online: 24 Jan 2012.

To cite this article: Gill Branston (1993) Infotainment: A Twilight zone,

Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 6:3, 351-358, DOI:
10.1080/13511610.1993.9968361

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 Innovation, Vol. 6, No. 3, 1993 351

Infotainment: A Twilight Zone

GILL BRANSTON

ABSTRACT The article considers current uses of the terms 'infotainment' and 'tabloid TV in
relation to contemporary British media and debates or panics around its Americanization; British Public
Service Broadcasting (PSB) traditions; the relationship of information and entertainment in formal
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education; and postmodernist celebrations of the collapsing of such categories. It tries to separate and
understand historically what have so far been three major areas designated by these terms in British
debates: (1) 'faction' dramatizations (e.g. Crimewatch), (2) high-tech early evening youth programmes,
and (3) news-centredforms (such as breakfast TV) seen as bringing information and entertainment into
too close, or inappropriate, a relationship. Blurring of such boundaries in contemporary and in older PSB
TV, as well as in formal education is taken as context for a reconsideration of how PSB and broader
'Enlightenment' agendas might be defended; how well the tabloid comparison worksfor contemporary TV,
and what might be said in favour of 'infotainment' as well as against it in the present destabilized
conditions of TV journalism.

In this article I want to make a few observations on tensions involved in uses of the word
'infotainment' (and 'tabloid TV' which has grown in importance as the article has been
written). Like 'spin doctors' and 'spin'—first noticed in Britain around the time of the
Gulf Wai"—such terms seem to accelerate and shift journalistic discourses, especially in
areas where considerable cynicism or anxiety exists, like the reporting of British and US
electoral politics, or the Gulf War. They also conflate attitudes to changes within British
broadcasting involving the relationship and long histories of two key terms—'informa-
tion' and 'entertainment'. It seems so far that 'infotainment' refers to one of three kinds
of TV, at least in Britain. These three varieties are discussed below.
(1) programmes which dramatize 'actuality material' and which previously were—and
often still are—called 'faction' or 'drama-documentary'. Examples would include Crime-
watch and its various spin-offs, as well as Hostages, Rescue 991, Michael Winner's True
Crimes, and even the controversial 1992 election campaign Labour party political
broadcast involving the dramatization of a real-life medical case-history.
(2) 'tabloid TV', involving what is seen as a 'too close' relationship of news, current
affairs and entertainment discourses, both as juxtaposition, as a mode of address, and as
a reversal of traditional agenda priorities. Examples from British TV would include The
Big Breakfast and other early morning programmes which involve news items, and chat
shows such as those hosted by Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donohue or 'Richard and Judy'.
(3) a much smaller group, but one which, significantly, is sometimes invoked by the
term, is that of youth programmes involving a fast, often jokey and hi-tech, information-
saturated treatment of current affairs/news areas. Examples are often associated with the
 352 G. Branston

name of Janet Street Porter and include the early evening BBC-2 Reportage, and its Rough
Guide series.

An unprecedented mingling?
In areas (1) and (2) above, the worry articulated through the use of the term 'infotain-
ment' is that an unprecedented and undesirable mingling is taking place, one which will
pollute both parties, but especially the 'information' side of the exchange. Some not
unfamiliar points need to be made here about the existing, far from pure, context of
British broadcasting.
First, despite the formal requirements on British TV, at least in those areas still
deemed 'public service', to organize its output according to what is seen to be
'entertaining' and what is seen to be 'informative and educative', the impossibility of
vacuum-packing these two areas has long been acknowledged. 'Hard facts' themselves,
the godhead of information discourses, are for most of the purposes of TV highly
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constructed and selected, and of limited usefulness on their own for sophisticated
understanding of complex issues, even in those cases where they do not border on fictions
or publicity handouts. Reliance on 'hard statistics' and opinion polls are perhaps the
most vivid examples of the limitations of this particular kind of fetishization.
Moreover the strategies by which TV documentaries and news programmes have
sought to make themselves worthy of ratings often involve the formal operations of fiction
and entertainment. Narrativization, spectacularization and the mechanisms of melo-
drama have been used in the competition for audiences between TV channels as well as
newspapers. But if news has long used such 'entertainment' strategies, it is conversely true
that some of the pleasures of many 'entertainment' programmes could be said to be
cognitive and related to what we can broadly characterize as the public rather than
private spheres. The privately enjoyed pleasures of many texts consist of information, of
recognitions which can even shade to solidarities, or the offering of competencies,
whether in the field of personal relationships or of other skills. Of course, the cultural
status of the programme and, therefore, the audience involved affects how the balance
of information and entertainment is perceived.
Neither newspapers (even broadsheets)—mixing, as they do, news with many other
forms, including entertainment—nor TV news existing as they do in the flow of a
medium delivering all kinds of heterogeneous forms, can lay claim to being pure
information. And finally, the designation of any media text as mosdy informative, or
entertaining by the academic critic will not necessarily coincide with the uses made of
that text by real life audiences in the rest of the real world (or indeed by the real life critic
in the rest of his or her existence). Father's apparently serious attention to the news on
return from work may be also a way of escaping pleasurably from the demands of family
interaction, and his daughter's escape into Neighbours may also be an absorbed study of
information on how to conduct important relationships.

1990s British contexts

However, while such points helpfully deconstruct this legislated opposition 'informative-
entertaining', they no longer have quite the glamorous charge they possessed in the early,
heady days of deconstruction's first certainties, and indeed seem recently to have been
used somewhat disingenuously by some cultural populists1. The fears expressed through
a term like 'tabloid TV", first cousin to 'infotainment', cannot simply be dismissed as the
result of a benightedly positivist notion of truth. They are perhaps better seen as
 Infotainment: A Twilight gone 353

concerning the perception of the troubling relationship between the power of a set of
textual practices which are often inexpensive, and can be described as 'tabloid', and
growing patterns of concentrated ownership and power across media industries, espe-
cially those trading news and information.
One of the main concerns of those opposed to these concentrations of discursive and
economic power is the pressure they put on the (often expensive and labour intensive)
best of public service broadcasting. Unfortunately, one of the most offensive habits of
defenders of PSB is the resort to a knee-jerk and often very masculinist anti-Americanism
when describing those forms said to threaten it. The phantom of 'wall to wall Dallas'
which haunted many statements during the passage of the 1990 Broadcasting Act
through Parliament relied on both the crudest kind of anti- Americanism, and the
dismissal of a form assumed to be enjoyed mostly by a low-status, because female,
audience. All would be well, it was implied, if only we could get back to Brideshead Revisited
and a light sprinkling of Dimblebys.
Terms (or rather terms of abuse) such as 'infotainment', 'confrotainment', 'mockumen-
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tary' or 'faction' are often commented on as odd or inappropriate simply because

neologism equals Americanism within the English language. John Birt's playing of the
patriotic card in the schedules announced for 1993, with such items as a 'National
Theatre of the Airwaves', ignores the indebtedness of the best of British broadcasting to
American forms, from the single play through current affairs and news formats to
innovative sitcoms and soaps. Finally, the use of a term like 'infotainment' allows the
depth of cynicism which currently exists around the conduct of public life, including
television, to be confused with the familiar position of blaming nothing but TV or, even
more narrowly, blaming a TV form.

Other accounts
Let's consider in a little more detail the three categories I suggested earlier to see how
the homogenizing sweep of 'infotainment' and 'tabloid' might be broken down. Crime-
watch is often discussed as though its blend of information and entertainment through
dramatizing 'real-life' crime cases were disturbing because audiences are necessarily
gullible, or might over-easily be drawn into the role of dumb vigilantes because of this
formal mixing. In such contexts it is enough to murmur insinuatingly that faction series
head the American ratings, as though mini-series involving impersonations of the Royal
family and single faction films such as World In Action's Hostages were roughly the same.
The reasons for the high viewing figures for Crimewatch and similar series certainly
deserve consideration in the context of 'infotainment' forms. Such 'faction' offers the
pleasures of emphatic narrativization, and moreover Crimewatch narrativizes within the
immensely satisfying genre of detection, which promises that the world can be ordered,
that a way can be found through the maze, by something as tiny as a fingerprint or vocal
intonation. Even the smallest detail can be made to count within such factions, which
makes a refreshing, if not Utopian, change from the experience of much of everyday life.
Television itself is for once foregrounded as actor, as having agency in a situation similar
to many which are simply reported, on the news, as though there were nothing anyone
could do about anything. As well as this rare identity for TV, and its audience, as openly
an agent—'Have you seen this man?'—the audience also gains some, highly selective,
knowledge of the workings of that secretive institution, the police, and there is often an
emphasis on the pleasures of a team/community 'all pulling together'.
The objections to Crimewatch, of course, are well worth repeating. The selection of
crimes to be investigated stays within a particular definition of crime, as small-scale,
 354 G. Branston

individual, exciting (and therefore, of course, amenable to factionalization within known

and highly visualizable genres). How could crime prevention possibly compete in these
'sexy' ratings stakes? This sense of 'crime on the streets' is not a million miles away from
the 'law and order' agenda of the 1980s and, indeed, early 1990s. Mot likely to feature
on such a programme are corporate crime, or other acts, large and small, involving the
over-powerful or, of course, the crimes of some police forces themselves. It has been
suggested that the police are quite glad for the kind of trade-off which Crimewatch
represents for them, in offering images of a likeably open-handed force in place of
documentary or even news coverage of, say, the West Midlands serious crimes squad.
It has also been suggested that where crimes against women are featured, there is a
tendency to focus on the victim to a greater extent than in discussion of other types of
crime, and that the voyeuristic pitfalls of rape reconstruction are not (cannot?) always be
avoided. This is argued to be often related to the programme's failure to emphasize the
fact that most murderers are not from 'off the street' but in the next room (Schlesinger
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et al, 1992). Unfortunately, it is not usually these points, relating to the agenda of the
programme, which are at play in the formalistic but very powerful objection to such
shows as simply, homogeneously 'infotaining' and therefore objectionable.
The second group of TV products, youth programming, is often discussed in terms
which reveal other anxieties compounded within 'infotainment'. This part of British TV
output is associated with the name Janet Street Porter, (and is sometimes pronounced
'yoof TV'). Her name alone can be used to evoke a kind of unBritish brashness (at least
on the part of a woman) and Reportage and parts of the rest of De/IIbe made to signify,
in that gloomy way beloved of many commentators, the flash and grab times we live in.
In particular, Reportage is sometimes described as 'too much' and yet 'too little', especially
in what is seen as a bewildering overkill of information resources in conjunction with
music, pacey video editing, graphics, and special effects. This, it is suggested, is viewing
as distraction, not permissible in current affairs TV, which is still supposed to be watched
by serious men on the edge of their armchairs.
Yet the early evening youth slot suggests quite different audiences. And the hetero-
geneity of the topics broached (e.g. under a heading such as Seven Deadly Sins, or in the
Rough Guides to careers and holiday destinations in the 1990 series) is paralleled by the
very different ways in which it seems to be viewed and used, sometimes as distraction,
as cruising TV and sometimes on video, later, for quite close reading of career or cheap
holiday details which have been lightly, infotainingly presented. While there is a highly
consumerist emphasis on the holiday/travel guides, the 'stunts' objected to in Reportage
often recall the early days of World In Action, now seen as a hallowed grove of PSB but
then scandalously 'trashy' and 'tabloid'2.

Tabloid TV
Woven through these objections can be discerned snobberies, regressive nationalism, and
nostalgia for an imagined past of PSB. These surface most clearly in discourses around
'tabloid TV' where, usually within a form organized to a significant extent around news,
such as breakfast TV, it is suggested that news items of too great a difference have been
yoked together, or that inappropriately unserious discourses have been used for serious
items, or simply that entertainment and news have been brought into too great a
proximity. Points have already been made about the long reliance on some measure of
entertaining narrativization within TV 'broadsheet' news. But many commentators seem
nostalgic for a past in which Panorama and World In Action blocked the road of the
schedules, and anything which happened outside the term times of Parliament could be
 Infotainment: A Twilight £one 355

dubbed 'silly season', thus ensuring weighty debates within the public sphere, usually
assumed to consist of men talking in common rooms, school staff rooms and occasionally
pubs and bars. Such fantasies of the public-political may be quite unattractive to many
others in the TV audience, who do not find themselves with easy access to suits, or to
authority within such a forum.
The shock of the suggestion that TV news is becoming tabloid has to be seen within
the context of its highly privileged status. As Margaret Morse (Morse, 1986) points out,
it has been attributed with having a special relation to the 'real', and a cohesive function
in a society seen as mobile and fragmented. The mode of address of such public service
news and current affairs TV has been described by John Fiske as:
Serious, official, impersonal, and (is) aimed at producing understanding and
belief. . . . it produces a believing subject, and this is one of the most defining
differences between official and tabloid news. (Fiske, 1992).
This difference involves the line between information and entertainment forms. Interest-
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ingly enough, it also describes much written, and, indeed, spoken academic discourse. It
perhaps accounts for the attachment of some academics to serious documentaries and
news. This includes feminists who might at the same time be insisting on a break with
the fantasy of being able to deny fantasies of identification, ofmerging, which is built into
the distancing project of both news and academic discourse. There is also perhaps a
bonding across shared ironies: the media seem ever more knowing and fractured, while
hanging on to the 'certainties' of consumption (and some of the certainties of patriarchy),
just as academic discourse announces the fracturing and cross-cutting of identity while
hanging on to the validating authority and identity of lecturer and examiner. There are
those who would suggest that even H.E. is becoming 'entertainment' driven (in the sense
of a populist mode of address, the felt need to compete with TV etc.) under the impact
of increasing student numbers without the funding to make full discussion (necessarily in
small groups) possible or, importantly, enjoyable.

Tabloid TV?
Yet in some ways 'tabloid' is an odd term to apply to TV, which cannot or does not yet
exactly replicate, for example, the key tabloid relationship between huge, often jokey
headline and front page photo. The deployment of moving images on TV does not at
all correspond to the tabloid papers' use of photos. Becker (1992), for example, suggests
that in addition to traditional 'news' type shots, there are three kinds of photos used in
tabloid newspapers: Plain photos of 'ordinary people', resembling those of the family
album but whose caption or article tells us why these people are extraordinary;
identification photos in 'Wanted' style (and here the resonance with Crimewatch is clear);
and, perhaps most notoriously, there are the paparazzi's photos of Royalty and other
celebrities.
British TV does not yet reproduce all these categories in quite this relationship, indeed
it is still characterized by a kind of fear of the visual even as it relies overwhelmingly on
the most banal and repetitive use of shots of politicians getting in and out of planes, trains
and automobiles. The constitutionally binding need for TV news to appear impartial
means it cannot, in the main, reproduce the often funny, admittedly often callous and
xenophobic, tone of some British tabloid headlines and editorials. 'THRONE ALONE'
chortled The Sun on the announcement of the Wales' separation. When such a tone is
heard on television, as in The Friday Alternative, Channel Four's early, ground breaking
current affairs/news programme, taken off air in 1983, powerful objections are often
 356 G. Branston

raised, ostensibly on the grounds of 'amateur' or even 'tabloid' style, but actually because
of an irreverent and probing stance on controversial issues. In the same way, the howls
of protest at the ways in which revelations about the state of royal marriages, or the
subsidy of the Chancellor's legal bills by taxpayers have been gained, have blurred the
broader issues which such investigative journalism raises.
This is another, key meaning to 'tabloid': A tone of irreverence, clarifying and
dramatizing issues, sometimes by staging encounters and events around them. Its mode
need not necessarily be tied to any single political stance (though of course its tendency
is likely to be anti-certain kinds of intellectuality). The staging of an encounter at his
country mansion between Michael Heseltine and a mining family just after the coal
closure announcements of 1992 by the Sunday Mirror was as 'tabloid' as a sub-species of
'drama-doc.', resembling the early days of the currently much revered World In Action.
Could it also be an example of 'quality tabloid'?
Other forms of tabloidization within TV raise different questions. Some mainstream
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news and current affairs forms seem to be adopting a more personalized and subjective
discourse which several writers (Fiske, 1992; Connell, 1992) have suggested partly
constitutes tabloid TV forms. In particular, newscasters are argued to be moving away
from the earlier objective narrational modes which the news shared with legal discourses.
ITN's early evening news, for example, now often opens in breathless messenger mode,
implying both curiosity and prior knowledge on the viewer's part: "Hello. The chief has
resigned. There may be 20 deaths. . . . " (on a London ambulance computer failure), or
"Hello. The backbenchers are seething". It will make use of a relative expressivity of
newscaster's voice and face, will often include a joke or exclamation or heavily
narrativized 'teasers'. Such emphatic narrativization and subjectification can be under-
stood either as the seeping power of some homogeneous entity called 'infotainment', or,
for example, as mainstream news seeking to remedy what Justin Lewis (Lewis, 1992) and
others have characterized as its failure to use the codes of narrative so as to make its
stories memorable, or even as partly determined by the touching faith of TV in the
traditional nuclear family, and an assumed predominantly female audience at this time
of night.
On many channels, news is still timed as a "daily ritual of transition" (Morse, 1986,
p. 75) with the morning news as transition from the privacy of the home to the realm
of work, and the early evening news as decompression chamber in the opposite direction.
Already, though, 24 hour 'rolling news' channels, on TV and radio, disrupt these
rhythms and identities, and as there occur further radical changes in employment
patterns, so there will be further shifts in the mode of addressing news, and forms which
include it, according to who can be assumed to be watching. The resulting instability can
be seen most vividly in breakfast TV, for example in Channel 4's The Big Breakfast, with
its mix of kiddy-TV bright colours, ruthless cheerfulness, Paula (a.k.a. Lady Geldof) on
the bed with a celebrity and, in the middle of this targeted mix, a few minutes of news
with (timidly) tabloid-style written headlines. Such entertainment-led forms, especially on
grim British January mornings, can be understood as examples of what Goodwin (1989)
calls the Utopian optimism of infotainment forms. In the USA, he argued, (in 1989,
referring to such programmes as USA Today) this took the form of a rejection of "the
worthy agendas of traditional news" which often leave their audiences feeling powerless,
in favour of'the journalism of hope'—'relentlessly positive' stories focusing on individual
'solutions' to global problems, such as how to negotiate a terrorist road block, or an
urban riot.
Subjectification also, increasingly, takes other highly agenda-ed forms such as the
interview with the victims of (a very limited set of) crimes, who are often invited to
 Infotainment: A Twilight £one 357

express their initial, most intense (hopefully vengeful?) emotion, and with victims who are
encouraged to voice their anger at the inadequacy of a jail sentence, or to suggest their
own punishment for the crime. A rather cosy relationship between police and media is
exemplified in the family press conference just a few hours after many crimes of violence.
At this level of agenda, rather than of forms, the links with Crimewatch are as clear as the
ways in which they reinforce the law and order lobbies of the 1990s. They are not,
however, the same, single 'thing' as 'infotainment' and the recourse to 'non-elite
personages' is not in itself the end of news as we know it.

Porno news?
As Morse suggests,
the resort to charismatic and primary forms in the news . . . may be part of a
larger cultural shift away from the forms of realism, literacy and objectivity
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which have dominated western culture since the Renaissance and the age of
industrialization. (Morse, 1986, p. 76)
We might also connect some 'infotainment' forms with the fundamental destabilizations
partly described by the term 'postmodernism'. These can involve a welcome loosening
of previous, often oppressive, identities (in this context, the identification of 'quality' TV
as Realist and Very Serious, and the quarantining away from it of 'entertainment' forms,
usually associated with working class or female (or, horror, working-class-female) audi-
ences. And cultural critics such as Said and Rushdie have argued persuasively that the
new arrives in the world through hybridization, or through 'travelling' forms.
But once identities are less sclerotic and, at least in the relatively privileged parts of the
west, can be experienced as multiple, playful, melancholic and so on, there remains the
question of how far it is possible to junk the projects of the (often dark and deficient)
Enlightenment. How to modernize those worthy agendas which often motivated both
traditional news forms, and some of those cultural populists who celebrate anything
except the larger agendas of their own education.
As Kate Soper puts it in another context:
Why . . . lend ourselves to the politics of 'difference' if not in virtue of its
enlightenment? . . . Why challenge truth if not in the interests of revealing the
potentially manipulative powers of the discourses that have attained the status
of knowledge? (Soper, 1989)
Perhaps the discrediting of global Thatcherism's reliance on privatization and the market
in the economic sphere, and the persuasiveness of attempts to rethink regulation there,
can be transferred to TV. We do not any longer have to go back to an imaginary, and
often pompous, golden age of British TV—Goodwin's depressing and elitist 'worthi-
ness'—as the only alternative to tabloid Utopian optimism. Mixed marriages between
information and entertainment forms are no longer unmentionable.
One way of re-thinking infotainment—a sub-set of instabilities within journalistic
discourses more generally—is, as Peter Dahlgren suggests (Dahlgren & Sparks, 1992) by
pushing those discourses to admit pleasure as a legitimate part of their purpose—and,
one might add, as part of their history. Such journalism would try to constitute its
audience as, also, a public, or rather a set of publics. The 'subjectivity' of changing
factual forms has to include a subjective sense of communities and politics which is not
simply complicit with law and order reflexes, nor with a feeling that the public sphere
as well as the murderer on the street, is 'out there', the one far away, the other
terrifyingly, but entertainingly, close.
 358 G. Branston

References
Becker, K. (1992) 'Photojournalism and the Tabloid Press', in: Dahlgren, P., Sparks, G.
(eds) Journalism and Popular Culture, London, Sage
Connell (1992) in: Dahlgren, P., Sparks, C. (eds), op. at.
Fiske, J. (1992) in: Dahlgren, P., Sparks, C.(eds) op. cit.
Goodwin, A. (1989) 'Tabloid TV', Mew Statesman and Society, February
Lewis, J. (1992) The Ideological Octopus, London, Routledge
McGuigan, J. (1992) Cultural Populism, London, Routledge
Morse, M. (1986) 'The Television News Personality and Credibility: Reflections on the
News in transition', in: Modleski, T. (ed.) Studies In Entertainment, Indiana University Press
Schlesinger P., Dobash, W. (1992) Women Viewing Violence, London, BFI
Soper K. (1991) 'Postmodernism, Subjectivity and the Question of Value', New Left
Review, Summer issue
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Notes
1. For a fuller account of this, see McGuigan (1992).
2. J. Merkin, 'Anarchist who sprang into Action', Guardian, Dec. 21, 1992.