Let Us Infotain You: Politics in the New Media Environment

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Abstract
Political beliefs and actions spring from assumptions, biases, and news reports. In this critical sense politics is a drama taking place in an assumed and reported world that evokes threats and hopes, a world people do not directly observe or touch…. The models, scenarios, narratives, and images into which audiences for political news translate that news are social capital, not individual inventions. They come from works of art in all genres: novels, paintings, stories, films, dramas, television sitcoms, striking rumors, even memorable jokes. For each type of news report there is likely to be a small set of striking images that are influential with large numbers of people, both spectators of the political scene and policymakers themselves. Murray Edelman, From Art to Politics (p. 1) We are living in an era where the wall between news and entertainment has been eaten away like the cartilage of David Crosby's septum. Al Franken, Chief Political Correspondent, Comedy Central Political communications scholars, members of the press, and political elites have traditionally distinguished between entertainment and nonentertainment media. It is in public affairs media in general and news media in particular that politics is assumed to reside, and it is to this part of the media that the public is assumed to turn when engag- ing the political world. Politics, in this view, is a distinct and selfcontained part of public life, and citizen is one role among many played by individuals. As a former network television executive put it, in the civic education of the American public, entertainment programming is recess.

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