Television Journalism, Politics, and Entertainment

Abstract

This article discusses two trends in the debates about contemporary television journalism. First, journalism is said to be increasingly subsumed an economic logic, privileging entertainment before serious journalistic practices. Most often, this is framed as if entertainment is eating its way into serious journalism, affecting it negatively and thus being detrimental for the political public sphere and political reasoning. Second, it is often pointed to a changed relation between journalism and politicians, where the latter have lost some of their power, for example, in political debates. This article relates these two trends and argues, against a field model inspired by Bourdieu, that it is not entertainment that is eating its way into journalism, but the other way around: Rather than having been absorbed by entertainment, journalism has differentiated, become more autonomous as a subfield of cultural production, and has gradually come to dominate both factual and entertainment television.