Worries about today’s journalism go beyond smaller newsrooms and shorter attention spans. Big newspapers, once key to a healthy democracy, are now into “infotainment” – mixing entertainment methods with important political news.
A recent study from Concordia University looks at how much infotainment is in Canada’s top newspapers. They focused on the 2019 federal election, checking stories from the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, National Post, Montreal Gazette, Calgary Herald, and the Vancouver Sun. The last four were grouped together because they often had the same articles.
Exploring the news
The study looked at 969 different hard news items over the 41-day campaign. Each item got a score from one to five: one for mostly informative and five for mostly entertaining.
Results showed over half, 51%, of hard news articles had clear infotainment traits (rating three to five). And 42% had strong infotainment traits (four or five). On the other side, almost half of the articles, 49%, showed little or no entertainment traits.
When they looked at each newspaper, they found 52% of Postmedia’s hard news items had a lot of infotainment (four to five rating). For the Toronto Star, it was 39%, and for the Globe and Mail, it was 35%. This shows a shift in how newspapers are presenting news during important events like elections.
Emotional discourse
“There is a fair amount of research that shows more conservative or right-wing political narratives tend to engage in more emotional discourses compared to more left-wing discourses, which tend to be more rationalist,” the researchers explain.
“We did hypothesize that these ideological differences might contribute to some of the results we found in Postmedia, which is typically more right-leaning than the Globe and Mail or Toronto Star. But it is hard to quantify by how much or to confirm this without further research.”
The researchers gathered insights from past studies on infotainment and crafted a thorough framework for in-depth exploration. They identified three main categories.
The first category is personalization, which involves spotlighting politicians and their personal traits, private lives, appearances, ways of speaking, and actions during an election campaign.
The second category is sensationalization, focusing on gaffes, scandals, sensational framing of topics, and emotionally charged narratives.
These two categories contribute to the third one, decontextualization. Here, the emphasis is on speculation and strategic game-framing – who’s leading in the latest poll, who gained points on the campaign trail, who pulled off a noteworthy trick or stunt – with little attention to actual policy options.
Despite the considerable amount of infotainment in mainstream Canadian newspapers’ political coverage, the researchers express some relief that the levels aren’t even higher.
“It is promising to see that there is still quite a strong amount of coverage that adopts an analytical or investigative tone that presents more concrete, substantive information about policy options and debates,” they conclude. “But the numbers also show that the infotainment approach has a lot of purchase in Canadian newspaper coverage. This can have important impacts on how voters are being informed during an election.”
