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News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment, Daya Kishan

Thussu, London: Sage. 2007. Pp. 214. ISBN: 9780761968795 (paperback),
9780761968788 (hardback)

Article in Ecquid Novi African Journalism Studies · June 2009

DOI: 10.3368/ajs.30.1.94

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Thussu, Daya Kishan (2007). News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment.
London: Sage Publications, 214 pp, ISBN: 978-0-7619-6878-8 (hardback), ISBN: 978-
0-7619-6879-5 (paperback).

Reviewed by Miguel Vicente Mariño, Departamento de Sociología, Facultad de

Ciencias Sociales, Jurídicas y de la Comunicación, Universidad de Valladolid - Campus
de Segovia

If somebody enters the first three words of the title of this book in the worldwide known
Google webpage, sadly he or she will not find the cover of this manuscript. The first
link leads the audience to the ABC News Entertainment section full of soft news about
celebrities, beauty, fashion or media. Only well trained Internet users will arrive at the
book’s website after having refined their search by including the subtitle or visiting one
of the diverse specialised websites.
This anecdote is obviously not the usual way to begin a book review, but it is
one of the best methods to highlight the main relevance and the wide interest in the
topic analysed in this refreshing and critical essay by Daya Kishan Thussu who is
Professor of International Communication at the University of Westminster.
Infotainment has become one of the most fruitful concepts to describe not only
contemporary television but also overall lifestyle. Thussu is one of the first scholars
who wrote about this genre some years ago and with his last book he completes a
brilliant overview of the dimensions and the evolution of a common process all around
the world.
Traditional boundaries between information and entertainment are being blurred
by daily professional media developments in a process that also affects other genres and
formats, such as the increasingly blurred division between information and opinion. TV
programmes tend to use a confusing mix-up between elements usually associated with
independent areas of production. Nowadays it is hard to find audiovisual spaces focused
on pure information, because a complete process of domestication of the audience has
been completed during the last decades: pure news requires an effort that spectators do
not want to undertake and that journalists cannot afford to produce.
It is almost impossible to determine with whom and when the process began, but
the current ‘state of the art’ is clear: traditional audiovisual genres have confusingly
merged in after some decades of incorporating amusing elements into news discourse.
That could be one of the reasons why terms like info-show or infotainment explain
better and clearer what audiences see on their screens. News as Entertainment provides
many examples of the consequences of these practices, most of which relate to the idea
of ‘dumbing down’ public discourses.
A process of globalisation of the growing presence of infotainment has occurred
during the last years in most of our contemporary societies. Although technological
indicators show a solid development of some resources like the Internet, television
keeps on broadening its relevance in comparison with the rest of the communication
channels. Visual images can cross linguistic and national boundaries relatively easy, so
television carries much more influence than other media. This is especially so in
developing countries where a large groups of citizens cannot read or write. Everything
seems to lead to a global infotainment sphere, as one of the main hypotheses of this
book argues.
Thussu shows once again his deep knowledge about media and communication
relations established all over the world, trying to draw the attention to the risks and
consequences of an uncontrolled flow and trade of media and cultural products. Case
 studies focused on India and other developing countries provide significant and solid
evidence about the United States influence on TV and media production, all of them
well surrounded by firm survey and content analysis data.
The emphasis on the ownership and control of media is always present,
underlining the theoretical approach of the author and highlighting the global
inequalities between countries. Political economy is combined with media studies in a
critical framework of analysis.
Thussu completes an excellent overview that promotes a good understanding of
contemporary broadcasting, creating a narrow web that includes close phenomena and
fields of knowledge, such as global corporations’ business, cultural influences, and
public opinion. Audiovisual content is often linked to dominant political and economic
structures: those societies more subject to the globalisation process suffer a diminishing
news quality that is also being exported to the rest of the countries. A market-driven
television journalism significantly impacts on the public sphere and dilutes news and
information at a global scale.
Global infotainment is defined by Thussu as the globalisation of US-style
ratings-driven television journalism which privileges privatised 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. In fact, Thussu criticises some
post-modernist approaches to these TV formats which justify as entertainment what is,
in fact, a devaluation of the public sphere.
More than twenty years ago, Neil Postman (1986) explained that public
discourse in the United States was assuming the form of entertainment. Nowadays,
United States is far from being an exception: the process has reached a global
dimension. The growing influence of television in most of daily citizens’ lives has
helped entertainment to become one of the contemporary key cultural concepts. Some
of the traditional boundaries established by the journalists are being blurred by new
hybrid production styles and consequences fall far beyond the TV fields. Daya Kishan
Thussu brings back to light Postman’s pessimistic hypothesis and provides powerful
evidence for considering that most of the problems detected are far from being solved.
This book has the power and the argument to open minds and to go beyond the
boundaries of the scholarly landscape.

Postman, N. (1986). Amusing ourselves to death : public discourse in the age of show
business. London, Heinemann.

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