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Producción Científica ; This research work focuses on the study of political "infotainment", a genre related to television (Schudson, 1999; Blumler, Kavanagh, 1999; Brants, 1998; Delli Carpini, Williams, 2001; Holtz-Bacha, Norris, 2001; Baum, 2002), but which in recent years has achieved a presence in other mass media, including the Internet. This work shows the presence of a large number of political videos, which meet the features of infotainment on the YouTube platform. Specifically, an analysis is presented of the most popular videos according to the number of times they have been viewed, when information on the following political representatives of European politics in 2011 is searched on YouTube: Nicolas Sarkozy (France), Silvio Berlusconi (Italy), Gordon Brown (United Kingdom) or José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (Spain), as well as the USA President Barack Obama (EEUU). The aim of this study is to determine wether the television infotainment phenomenon has been transferred to the Net on the international scene. For this purpose, 100 videos were studied from the perspective of Spanish researchers, which corresponded to the twenty most watched videos of each of the following political leaders or ex-leaders: Gordon Brown, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Obama and Rodríguez Zapatero. The study carried out is a quantitative and descriptive analysis of the content. The analysis template has been designed using independent and dependent variables, with multiple choice or dichotomous answers. The data confirm that Political infotainment is a genre related to television which has been transferred to Internet. However, on Internet these videos emerge as a hybrid genre because they combine some of the videos produced and broadcast by television, and custom modifications of the people posting these videos on YouTube. ; Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (CSO2012-34698)

"Using the methodology of modality-specific enhanced conversational analysis, this study examines how a TV cooking show imparts a social reality within the genre of mass-media infotainment. The study focuses on the verbal and physical-visual procedures used by the interacting parties to carry out the constitutive conversational activities of "informing," "educating," and "evaluating" in a genre-specific manner"--

Aus sprachwissenschaftlicher Sicht liegt in der Untersuchung von massenmedialen TV-Formaten,die von Fernsehschaffenden und der Medienwissenschaft als Infotainment bezeichnet werden, eine Forschungslücke vor. Es ist bislang nichts darüber bekannt, wie die Interagierenden in solchen Sendungen situativ mit den massenmedialen Anforderungen von Informationsvermittlung und Entertainment umgehen. Die Untersuchung geht auf der Basis von 40 Stunden Sendematerial einer bekannten deutschen Kochsendung der Frage nach, mittels welcher verbalen sowie körperlich-visuellen Verfahren die Beteiligten die mediale Gattung situativ als Infotainment hervorbringen. Zu diesem Zweck wird rekonstruiert, wie die Interagierenden die für die Sendung konstitutiven Aktivitäten "Informieren", "Belehren" und "Bewerten" durchführen, um den Anforderungen der Gattung im Spannungsfeld von Informationsvermittlung und Entertainment zu begegnen. Die Untersuchung leistet so einen Beitrag zur multimodalen Fundierung einer linguistischen Analyse von konversationellen Aktivitäten und zeigt Perspektiven für eine Weiterentwicklung einer gesprächsanalytisch arbeitenden Medienlinguistik auf.

Die Autorin skizziert die Funktion politischer Fernsehmagazine im Zeitalter des Infotainments. Wie sich das Genre im Rahmen eines zunehmend auf Unterhaltung und auf den sogenannten "Massengeschmack" ausgerichteten Programmangebotes erfolgreich behaupten konnte, wird dargestellt. Im Mittelpunkt des Beitrags stehen die Ergebnisse einer quantitativen Analyse, auf deren Grundlage inhaltliche und formale Veränderungen politischer Magazine seit der Einführung des dualen Rundfunksystems untersucht und nachgewiesen werden. Es wurden 80 Magazinsendungen aus dem öffentlich-rechtlichen und privatkommerziellen Spektrum untersucht. Politische Fernsehmagazine sind seit Mitte der 50er Jahre ein fester Bestandteil der deutschen Fernsehgeschichte und dienen in ihren vertiefenden Analysen der fachspezifischen Ergänzung der Nachrichtensendungen, indem sie gesellschaftspolitische Zusammenhänge einordnen, kommentieren und erörtern. Dabei verfügen sie über einen kritischen Aufklärungsanspruch, der zunächst nicht mit der Fernsehunterhaltung korrespondiert. Aufgrund der Konkurrenz mit anderen Formaten haben die politischen Magazine seit den 70er Jahren zunehmend Unterhaltungselemente eingesetzt, um eine breitere Zuschauerresonanz zu erzielen; seit der Zulassung privat-kommerzieller Fernsehanbieter Mitte der 80er Jahre hat sich dieser Trend noch verstärkt. Es zeigt sich, dass die privaten Anbieter einen erheblich höheren Infotainment-Anteil aufweisen, als die öffentlich-rechtlichen Konkurrenz. Die öffentlich-rechtlichen Magazine sind jedoch dynamischer, inhaltlich vielfältiger und tendenziell unpolitischer geworden. Eine drastische Darstellung von Gewalt findet dort nicht statt, doch spielt die Darstellung von Emotionen eine entscheidende Rolle. Fazit: Eine zunehmende Dramatisierung, Unterhaltungsorientierung und Entpolitisierung lässt sich für politische TV-Magazine nicht bestätigen. (RG)

The purpose of the article is to investigate, generalize, concretize, and compare the meaning of information and entertainment as the basic categories of the art history analysis of infotainment. Methodology. According to the purpose of the study, methods of a general theoretical nature were applied, in particular, methods of analysis, induction, and deduction, a method of synthesis, a phenomenological method that helped fix information and entertainment as phenomena, their reflective analysis and comprehensive comprehension in the context of the designated topic; and the methods of contemporary art history: to consider the structural components, methods, and functions of infotainment as a phenomenon of television art, to study the paradigms of entertainment and information in television programs, the method of art history analysis was applied; the comparative method helped to compare the specifics of the use of entertainment in television programs of the 20th century and at the present stage. Scientific novelty. Information and entertainment are investigated as the main structural components of infotainment. The theories of the game (R. Ortega, J. Huizinga, V. Stevenson) are extrapolated to the theory of entertainment in infotainment and it is revealed that the perception of materials offered by the media allows the recipients, as participants in the game, which takes place within spatial and temporal boundaries in accordance with their own laws, principles, and rules, to avoid social control and rules of the real world, as well as gain fictitious experience, which can later be transferred into real life; the viewer is a recipient for the sake of participation itself since he does not pursue additional goals, feeling a part of what he is watching; the viewer is immersed in the reality created by television, being guided in the maelstrom of various proposals for what meets his expectations. Conclusions. As a result of the conceptualization of information and entertainment as the basic categories of the art history analysis of infotainment, it has been revealed that the main intentions of mass consciousness at the present stage are aimed at hedonism and the symbolic transformation of the values of mass culture. Hedonism is a leading trend in modern television as a phenomenon of a mass culture focused on the viewer, on his desire to move away from problems: the accessibility of presentation of material, syncretism and magnetic audiovisual attractiveness greatly simplify the viewer's perception of not only news but information from any branch of human activity.

In many policy processes nowadays a variety of actors is involved which results in complex decision making processes, since these different actors have various perspectives on the problem and the matching solutions. Such complex processes are difficult to grasp in short reports in newspapers or on television, especially since journalists have to deal with increasing time pressures and demands to make news items more entertaining. This leads to biases in the construction of the policy processes. In this study we examine whether the biases of fragmentization, dramatization, personalization, the authority-disorder bias and the negativity bias can be found in media reporting on complex decision making processes in the Netherlands. We conducted a quantitative content analysis on media reports on five complex water management projects in the Netherlands. We found that in these media reports stories are often fragmentized, dramatized and unfavourably towards the project, and frequently an authority is blamed for not taking appropriates measures. Certain actors take advantage of these biases more than other actors: media attention for oppositional politicians and interest groups in particular relate significantly to the media biases.