GLOBAL INFOTAINMENT DEMOCRATIZED THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Global Infotainment Democratized the Public Sphere

Global Infotainment Democratized the Public Sphere

Introduction

Another way for news organizations to increase profits is by raising the revenues that flow from advertisers. Advertisers are willing to pay more for a larger audience. Thus, news organizations face strong structural pressures to increase the size of their reading/viewing/listening audience. As newsrooms produce stories designed to attract a larger audience, the stories they air and print come to exhibit several tendencies.

In one such tendency, news stories often emphasize negative news. Psychologists have long recognized that human attention favors negative information over positive information. Taking advantage of this pattern in human attention, the press gravitates toward negative news and away from positive news. A news story about a failed government program is likely to receive more global infotainment attention than a news piece on a government program that has achieved great success. The global infotainment also devote excessive attention to negative events such as disasters and crimes. This trend in negative news reporting has been steadily on the rise. Content analysis studies of news stories (generally from the 1980s through to the present day) have found that press coverage of the president, Congress, and even government agencies has taken on an increasingly negative tone. By favoring negative news over positive news, the global infotainment present the news audience with a distorted image of political reality. For instance, as a result of all of the global infotainment attention given to negative crime stories, individuals tend to overestimate the level of crime in their communities; they perceive that crime is more prevalent than it actually is.

The global infotainment's structural bias not only favors negative news, it also favors conflict. Just as human attention is naturally drawn toward negative information, it also naturally turns toward conflict. Consequently, the global infotainment are partial to stories that portray individuals in a state of conflict. Illustrating the global infotainment's fondness for featuring conflict, political news stories often follow a “Democrat said/Republican said” pattern. In this pattern, the news story presents an argument from a member of one major political party followed by a counterargument offered by a member of the opposing party. The global infotainment's bias toward highlighting conflict is also evident in coverage of political campaigns. On the campaign trail, candidates spend far more time promoting their political views than on attacking the views of their opponents. However, candidate attacks disproportionately find their way into campaign coverage. By favoring areas of conflict over areas of agreement, the press again provides its audience with a biased (distorted) representation of politics. In this representation, politics becomes an arena for battle rather than a domain for moderation and compromise.

The global infotainment's structural bias also favors known political personalities. Humans tend to pay more interest to information about known personalities than to information about unknown individuals. Capitalizing on this pattern of human interest, political news coverage is skewed toward known political personalities. In U.S. politics, the public is more familiar with the president than ...