The News
The News
You Gotta Love It
This chapter began while I was conducting interviews with Simpsons viewers about parody and satire (see Gray 2006). While discussing The Simpons’ news parody, one of my interviewees talked at length about her love for politics and the news. She watched, by her estimate, three to four hours each day of Canadian parliamentary access television, and was a voracious news consumer. Yet quite impassionedly, and with more than just Canadian humility, she insisted that a great deal of this was entertainment for her:
Don’t get me wrong: I do know every MP in Canada, and when it’s an election, I’ll tell you their opponents too. I can tell you what they believe, how well they debate, and how ugly or handsome they are. But I don’t just watch “to be a good citizen” and do my “Canadian duty” [laughs]. Really, I, it’s entertainment. I love it. I really love it. It’s my soap opera. There are, are villains, and good guys, you can cheer some on, and get involved. If I did all this just to vote, that would be excessive. I watch because it amuses me.
At the time, her comments were off-topic, so I rushed her along. But I remained fascinated by what was clearly a news fan, and by someone so impressively involved in Canadian polity, yet who talked of it in very un-Habermasian ways. This chapter marks a return to the site of news fandom, as I explore the love and passion for a genre that is given plenty of academic consideration, but rarely if ever as a fan object. “Serious” news and fandom are typically described with wholly different theoretical tool kits, but here I examine their points of contact to suggest a more profound marriage among news, politics, and fandom than many would deem either existent or appropriate.
To perform such a marriage between the news and an idea of fandom may seem either unholy or odd to some readers. Certainly, there is much established work to suggest that they are fundamentally different. Thomas Patterson defines what in America is frequently called “hard news” (or what others might call “real” or “political” news) as “coverage of breaking events involving top leaders, major issues, or significant disruptions in the routines of daily life, such as earthquakes or airline disasters. Information about these events is presumably important to citizens’ ability to understand and respond to the world of public affairs” (2000: 3). Amid the many concerns regarding contemporary infotainment and dumbed-down, “soft” journalism (e.g., Kerbel 2000; Patterson 2000; Postman & Powers 1992), and amid endless accusations of news bias, a very clear notion of news appears. News should, so goes the rationale, offer objective facts and reporting on current events, and other information relevant to the practice of citizenship, hailing its viewers as intelligent, cerebral individuals in search of rational debate and thought. Ingrained in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and in its protection of the press is the reflection that the free flow of information and opinions is vital to democratic citizenship and participation in civic society, and hence that the news acts as the very doorway to the public sphere, or agora. Indeed, Habermas’s notion of the public sphere (1989)1 is perhaps the most academically invoked ideal for news and media practice. Particularly important to this ideal is Habermas’s call for rational discourse: borrowing from a long line of post-Enlightenment thinking (see Marcus 2002), Habermas believed in the emotional as irrational, and thus in the need to separate heart from mind in this public sphere. Especially in the wake of Lippman (1922) and others’ fear of propaganda and emotional appeals polluting the news and, through it, democratic society, entertainment and the emotional have been seen as incommensurate with hard news, and as poisonous to its realm.
In contrast to the news as a supposedly somber, rational, informational genre would seem to lie the very concept of fans. By definition, fans have an avid like or love for something. Hills (2002) plumbs psychological depths to offer the elaborated idea that fans are those who have made of their beloved text a transitional object, in Winnicott’s terms (1974), imbuing it with special personal and/or communal symbolic value, and Hills, along with many others (e.g., Brooker 2002; Harrington & Bielby 1995; Jenkins 1992; Lewis 1992), has shown how fandom is a site of intense pleasure and often of play. In other words, fans have a remarkably emotional relationship to their beloved text. But Habermas (1989) documented the degree to which emotion, and particularly emotive forms of political communication, refeudalizes the public sphere, acting as an obstacle to a meaningful and active deliberative democracy in which all citizens are open to engage with all contributions to the public sphere. Hard news and fandom, then, would seem to be at loggerheads, as any ideal news program (ideally and supposedly the preeminent genre of political communication) would act as a paragon of (masculine) rationality, while the play, emotions, and entertainment of fandom mark it and the objects of fandom definitively as the (supposedly) emotional, feminine, bodily, and less civilizing.
But what about news fans? By news fans, I do not mean merely those who consume a lot of news, but those who construct fan-like relationships to certain news programs or texts, characters, and journalists, and those who speak of and relate to the news in fan-like ways. Furthermore, where infotainment detractors may well expect to see fan cultures surround soft news, here I am interested only in fans of hard news—congress or parliamentary access channels, and reports on stories of obvious and direct civic importance.2 In other words, what happens with and what can we learn from instances when the rational, uplifting, cerebral content of hard news encounters the emotion, enthusiasm, and excitement of fans?
As should be clear by now, I ultimately intend to suggest a confusion and a thorough mixing of rationality and emotion. But before we see this blurring in action, it is important to set the stage by beginning a deconstruction of the binaries between news and fandom, between elite ideals for news consumption and elite ideas of how the (fan) masses consume, and between rationality and emotion.
The Emotional News Consumer
The notion that the news does or should serve primarily an informational purpose has been easier to sustain when many studies of the news have focused either on its production or on idealized discussion of what the news should do. When we turn to audience theorists and researchers, though, we encounter many different uses for the news. In particular, Roger Silverstone discusses television’s, and especially television news’, role as a transitional object that creates for its viewers a sense of ontological security. The news, he notes, “holds pride of place as the genre in which it is possible to see most clearly the dialectical articulation of anxiety and security—and the criterion of trust—which overdetermines television as a transitional object, particularly for adult viewers” (1994: 16). The news tells us of how horrific the world is, but then controls this chaos with its perky newscasters, highly polished look, human interest stories, and the relaxed banter with weather and sports reporters; after suggesting that the world might fall apart, it rocks us to sleep at night, assuring us that everything will be okay, dear. In this way, Silverstone suggests, the news has become one of the primary coping mechanisms for living in a world replete with risk and fear.
Meanwhile, both Silverstone (1994) and Morley (2000) examine the news’ role in managing our sense of home and belonging. As a prime instance of what Hartley calls television as “cross-demographic communication” (1999), television news brings all sorts of ideas, people, and places across the threshold of our front doorstep, telling us of the world “out there.” By doing so, the news, and our use of it, becomes a key site for the negotiation not only of the idea of the family home but also of neighborhood and national home (Morley 2000). Hence, television news acts as a command center for many projects of identity and personal security that are deeply emotional, and not at all coldly “rational,” and yet that allow us to place ourselves in our house, neighborhood, nation, and world. Indeed, it is particularly noteworthy that both Silverstone and Hills draw from the same theoretical well—that of Winnicott’s object-relations theory (1974)—to explain, respectively, the news and fandom.
The likelihood that news reception and fan reception come from and draw on similar mental faculties is given further support by the recent neuro-political science of George Marcus (Marcus 2002; Marcus, Neuman, & MacKuen 2000). Marcus takes aim at the age-old belief in the separation of mind and heart, and at political and media theorists’ concern that the heart, passions, and emotion might invade the rational deliberative zone that is the mind. Drawing from Lakoff and Johnson’s work on the power of metaphors (1980), he shows the dangers of conceiving of heart and mind as distinct, independent, and antagonistic, and instead he consults neuroscience to paint a very different picture. Rational thought, he proves scientifically, requires emotions; indeed, neuroscience shows that much of our rational decision making is performed by our brain’s emotional center, or is at the very least made wholly possible by our brain’s emotional faculties. Thus, Marcus rebukes the common assertion that democracy is in danger, with entertainment and emotional appeal solely trivializing serious issues; rather, he argues, “rationality is a special set of abilities that are recruited by the emotion systems in the brain to enable us to adapt to the challenges that daily confront us” (2002: 7), and, therefore, “emotion is required to invoke reason and to enable reason’s conclusions to be enacted” (2002: 31). Emotion, after all, is what makes us care to think rationally in the first place, and it is emotion that drives us to work for change or for conservation. Emotion lets us deliberate, and then encourages us to act on that deliberation. Consequently, Marcus calls for “a sentimental citizen” (2002), gifted with “affective intelligence” (Marcus, Neuman, & MacKuen 2000), and he flips common assumptions to suggest that a wholly “rational,” “cerebral” electorate is one unfit to govern.
Drawing on the ideas of Marcus and others, Liesbet Van Zoonen (2005) examines how fan cultures display numerous traits of an ideal citizenship. Van Zoonen realizes the boldness of this idea, given many critics’ belief that, “Supposedly, entertainment brings audiences consisting of fans into being, whereas politics produces publics composed of citizens. Audiences and publics, fans and citizens, are thus constructed as involving radically different social formations and identities” (2005: 56). But she then observes numerous close parallels between fans and the ideal citizens of a deliberative democracy. First, she notes that “fan groups are social formations that are structurally equivalent to political constituencies” (2005: 58), groups united by a shared sense of values and a proclivity and willingness to act upon those values to some degree. Therefore, she observes an “equivalence of fan practices and political practices” (2005: 63), which leads her to ask provocatively, “Maybe, then, the only difference between fans and citizens is located in the different subjectivities on which they seem based; affective relations in the case of fans, cognitive processes in the case of citizens. Is this difference bona fide, though?” (2005: 63).
Van Zoonen is careful not to suggest a complete equivalence between fans and (ideal) citizens, but nevertheless denies the tenuous distinction as being based on affectivity rather than cognitive, rational thinking. She is also careful not to suggest that fan engagement could in any way be seen as a desirable alternative to political involvement; certainly, while some fan cultures are driven by deeply political motives, we must avoid seeing, for instance, a campaign to reinstate a favorite love interest on a television show as on a par with a presidential campaign. However, Van Zoonen sees great potential in fan cultures and their structuring logic for modeling meaningful citizenship. Fandom, she notes, “is built on psychological mechanisms that are relevant to political involvement: these are concerned with the realm of fantasy and imagination on the one hand, and with emotional processes on the other” (2005: 64). Fantasy, and a desire for change, along with the emotional investment required to work towards it, is a prerequisite to any and all political movements. Van Zoonen points to political rallies and conventions as some of the more obviously fan-like events in civic life, and realizes the need for such fan-like elements to motor both politics and citizens.
Clearly, then, we can see how politics and the news overlap with fan behavior and practice in many ways. Van Zoonen, Marcus, Morley, and Silverstone all show not only how the political is deeply affective and how it succeeds in part by offering emotional appeal but also how it must matter to the individual and must be consumed emotively to some degree if it is to become meaningful to its viewers. Hence, these writers suggest that fandom and political citizenship and an ideal consumption of the news are by no means foreign to each other. Meanwhile, we could also consult the wealth of fan studies literature to point out how highly literate, rational, and cerebral many fans are. If, though, as Van Zoonen argues, fandom offers models for political citizenship, this would seem to suggest that fans of the news itself might prove a particularly rich example of fandom and the political uniting to improve citizenship.
News Fandom: Ever the Twain Shall Meet
The beginning of November 2005 brought plenty of serious news to American readers and viewers. Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby, had been charged with leaking classified information; Hurricane Wilma had hit Florida; an earthquake in Pakistan had killed thousands; Harriet Miers had withdrawn her nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court, quickly followed by President Bush’s nomination of Samuel Alito; Asian bird flu fears were arising; and civil rights hero Rosa Parks had died. Thus, multiple issues ripe for discussion were on the table, ranging from the state of civil rights today to governmental response to natural disasters to the future balance of power in the Supreme Court. During a two-week span at the end of October and beginning of November, I explored several sites for the discussion of this news and the reporting of it. I consulted all of the news threads on Television without Pity (www.televisionwithoutpity.com), a site known for fan discussion of all things televisual, and I monitored three of the most popular news and politics blogs that allow room for discussion, one typically liberal—Daily Kos (www.dailykos.com)—and two typically conservative—Right Wing News (www.rightwingnews.com) and Little Green Footballs (www.littlegreenfootballs.com). I read through pages upon pages of commentary to see how this news was discussed both by people who identified themselves as fans of a particular news program and by posters whose frequency of visits and posts to a particular news thread, combined with the ways in which they discussed the news, coded them as either fans or at least fan-like.
This methodology was not intended to be wholly scientific; rather, it, like this chapter, is rudimentary and exploratory. In a cyberspace and blogosphere as vast as the Internet provides, accurate sampling is impossible, as can be the act of ascertaining accurate poster demographics upon which such sampling could be based. Ultimately, my methods represent an attempt to take a brief peek at how professed or obvious fans of the news talk about the news; deeper ethnography could undoubtedly reveal more, and I hope others take me up on this challenge for future work. Meanwhile, here I conflate individuals with different objects of fandom, ranging from a certain presenter to a party to a news program itself. Important differences exist among these subgroups, but, with very few exceptions, these posters only have access to these political “realities” through the textualized form of the news. Hence, just as, for instance, two fans, one of a character on a reality show and one of the show itself, both experience their object of fandom through reality television, and thus could be described as reality television fans, so too can these various subgroups be talked of here generically as news fans.
Perhaps most immediately surprising was the remarkable level of play with the news and its newscasters exhibited by these posters, even while they made serious points. For instance, a poster on Daily Kos (hereafter DK) dubbed prime-time cable-news debate-program host Chris Matthews “Tweety” in his/her post about press reaction to the alleged Libby leak, entitled “Tweety is schizophrenic”:
One day he’s all over the story, the next day Bush reacts with “nobility” to Libby’s resignation. Yeah, it’s so noble to let a perjurious, leaking aide resign instead of firing him, while keeping another perjurious leaking aide stay on the job. Maybe Tweety takes his meds for some shows and not others?
Or, on Television without Pity (hereafter TwoP), after opening a post by asking, “Does [prime-time cable-news-journal host] Keith Olbermann have no friends? Does his assistant secretly hate him? Is his producer blind? Because the man’s clothes? They BLIND me,” and continuing with fashion advice, a poster concludes by adding, “Also? I expected everyone else to report the standard Rosa Parks the tired seamstress story, but I expected more of Olbermann, to report the fact that Parks was a wonderful activist and organizer way before she even got on the bus.” Another poster, on Little Green Footballs (hereafter LGF), discussing the Democrats’ call for a closed Senate to debate intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq, states, “Yes, our intelligence stunk at the start of the war, I’m entirely in favor of investigating it until the cows come home. And it may just force a more open and honest accounting by Dubya of why we went in and why we now see additional justifications,” before adding, “But geesh, the grandstanding ignorant sluts of the Democratic rump, unbefreakinglievable.”
What we see in all three above-quoted remarks is an interesting mix of deliberative, “rational” opinion, and emotive, playful elements far more fan-like (or, in the last case, anti-fan-like) by nature. At one moment, for instance, Olbermann’s fashion sense is being discussed, then his coverage of Rosa Park’s death, with a point that addresses both the content and form of the news article in a smart, “rational” manner. Certainly, quotations like these abounded, to the point of being standard. Another poster at DK, for instance, addresses other posters’ comments that Bush has effectively ended the marriage between liberalism and Catholicism in America:
My spouse and I attend regularly, we teach catechism, and Bush can kiss my rosy, red butt. Go see Pax Christi and National Catholic Reporter, then read Fr. Andrew Greeley and Sr. Joan Chittister, and you’ll find reports of the death of liberals in the Catholic church are greatly exaggerated.
Significant evidence is marshaled to support the poster’s view, and he shares this with others, contributing to the wealth of this public sphere, but his summation of his regard for President Bush and his conservatism takes the emotive form of “Bush can kiss my rosy, red butt.” Or, one final example of this overlapping of emotionalism and rationality comes from a highly detailed attack on irascible right-wing ideologue and debate show host Bill O’Reilly’s reporting of illegal aliens. The TwoP poster engages in close analysis of O’Reilly’s words to note that
he denies ever describing illegal aliens as “biological weapons.” He swears to his audience that he “never said anything like that,” and claims to be the victim of “smear merchants.” And, yes, technically, he never said the words “biological weapons.” However, a caller on his show did use those words. The charming caller described illegal aliens as biological weapons because of the alleged diseases they carry, and likened them to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And Bill responded by agreeing with the caller, saying, “I think you could probably make an absolutely airtight case that more than 3,000 Americans have been either killed or injured, based upon the 11 million illegals who are here.” And yet he cries that he is the victim of malicious lies.
However, in opening the post, the writer responds to an ongoing discussion about O’Reilly’s views on spanking children as a punishment by opining, “O’Reilly’s spanking fetish confirms my suspicion that he’s secretly an ass freak.”
Name calling such as this is rampant, as, for instance, liberal discussion on DK often reverts to describing conservatives as “wingnuts” and painting crude caricatures of uneducated rednecks, while conservative discussion on LGF and Right Wing News (hereafter RWN) lashes out at the “moonbats” who, as one poster at RWN states, “hate America” and “have no ideas for the future [and] no ideas for the nation.” Particularly in such crude, childish forms, it would be easy to point to such statements as prime examples of where emotions destroy rationality, and indeed if one standard is to mix rational discussion with emotional play, sadly another is to merely curse and rage. Some such posts should hardly be looked to as helping deliberative democracy. When this same poster at RWN, for instance, chides liberals for possessing ideas that have already “failed in the Soviet Union,” the laughable equation of Soviet communism to the Democratic Party platform is worrying. This therefore illustrates a dire risk of fannish involvement with the news, for fans can at times adopt preformulated reading positions that only seek to find reaffirmation of already held beliefs (see Johnson in this volume; Sandvoss 2005a), which when applied to news consumption and political debate stands to harm the vitality of the public sphere. Certainly, the bulk of one-line posts that read, as does one at DK, “dumb-ass Republican hicks” in response to breaking news could hardly be seen as contributing greatly to public political discourse.
However, in the many instances when such emotional outburst and/or play is mixed with rational, thoughtful discussion, we should not be so quick to write off the emotional. One could, perhaps, see the emotional here as the assumed pass-key to community discussion—a display of “hip factor” to show that one belongs. But in many other ways, these sites are not fan communities in a traditional sense—there is little friendly banter, off-topic asides about struggles in life, supportive advice (see Bird 2003), or, as TwoP calls them, “meet markets.” The dictates of a political discussion board, as is shown, do not preclude emotionalism, but they clearly limit it. Thus, it seems unlikely that posters would feel the need to offer elaborated emotional pass-keys. Or, alternatively, we could see the emotional as variously motivating the commentary, or adding a human element to an otherwise cold, uninviting discussion. After all, it is in these emotive moments that the poster’s feelings are most evident, and hence they are the moments when we are invited to connect to the comment as something human, something more than disembodied typeface on our computer screen. They are moments that color and code the commentary as felt and as lived, and hence that call to us as readers. As much fan theory shows, the fan’s emotional play with texts frequently gives life and meaning to those texts—the Velveteen Rabbit principle that Jenkins discusses (1992: 50). While we must avoid thinking that only fans turn texts into rich symbolic products (see Gray 2003), fandom and fan-like feelings are a key mode by which many viewers can approach the world’s saturation with texts, and assign personal or communal meaning and value to any given text. In reading these news fans’ discussion of topics, I was watching a similar process at work, whereby the emotional investment with the story or newscaster framed and made possible the ensuing rational debate.
Above, I have quoted numerous examples of motivation to post out of anger or disappointment (themselves both key emotions in the fan’s repertoire), but, amusingly, many newscasters attracted love and adoration too. CNN reporter Anderson Cooper proved particularly popular with TwoP posters, as amid thoughtful discussion regarding his previous on-the-spot reporting on Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, some posters worried about why he was currently off the air, with one joking, “He’s at my house getting hot baths and massages. No more hurricanes for my man!” Keith Olbermann also had his share of fans, with the previously quoted discussion of his clothes coming in the middle of numerous TwoP posts expressing significant admiration for the man, yet playful concern for his wardrobe, hair, and even his “womanly hips.” NBC reporter Brian Williams, Tim Russert (host of CBS’s famed political interview program, Meet the Press), and Bill O’Reilly all had vocal fans too. However, while I am left with only their postings to judge from, the expressed basis of fandom was not merely looks or sense of humor, but reporting vigilance. Cooper’s fans talked glowingly of how informative and challenging his reports from New Orleans had been, as did Williams’s fans. O’Reilly’s felt his combative style broke through many guests’ rehearsed veneer, thus offering more of the story. Olbermann’s fans praised his sly wit and ability to see other, less-remarked-upon sides of various issues. And Russert’s fans felt his economy of reporting gave them, as one poster observed, “more news and more ideas per minute than many of the other schleps out there.” Therefore, rather than fantasies of hot baths with Cooper or of making over Olbermann being on the opposite end of a scale from attending carefully to what the newsmen were reporting, in many cases, the news fans showed the ability for fan-like engagement and civic duty to work together.
Furthermore, while these fans were hardly writing Russert fanfic or arranging O’Reilly cons, their fandom proved productive in its own ways. To begin with, in a deliberative democracy, to post one’s political beliefs and reactions to news stories and the perceived quality or reporting (or lack thereof), and to enter into political dialogue with others, is already productive, and contributive to civic discourse. Thus, their mere presence online is often automatically productive, and a key reason behind many excited appraisals of the blogosphere’s potential to re-energize politics (e.g., Gillmor 2003). But beyond posting, several posters share their letters either to news stations, newscasters, or politicians. Also, one DK poster, whose posts frequently appeared on the site, suggesting an active news viewership, included the transcript of a phone call he made to conservative pundit Sean Hannity’s talk radio program. Other entries at the blogs, too, showed remarkable footwork, as, for example, one DK poster compiled a list of all one hundred senators’ reactions to Harriet Miers, and another RWN poster offered a painstaking line-by-line refutation of an excerpted article from DK. Finally, many posters write of off-line political activity, making it clear that these websites had by no means become virtual agoras far removed from flesh-and-bone reality.3
Taking the News to Heart
While I hesitate to offer any grand conclusions based on a limited study, the activities of these news fans are nevertheless revealing. First of all, we (and political communication scholars in particular) must acknowledge that news fans exist, and in significant numbers; thus, clearly, entertainment, fiction, and supposedly “low” culture are not alone in inspiring such audiences. Beyond mere existence, though, remains the issue of the nature and meaning of their activity. Most democratic political theorists dream of an electorate who continually update themselves with news and opinions, who discuss this news and these opinions with others, and who take politics and policy seriously. Here, I found many such individuals. And yet far from being somber, rational conversationalists, these individuals were emotionally involved, exhibiting many of the emotive, playful qualities of fandom in the ways in which they consumed, processed, and discussed the news. Many were savvy viewers, keen to critically evaluate, and yet they also cared, ranted, had fun, and got angry. Ultimately, though, rather than read this as an indictment of these viewers, I pose that we instead indict the unrealistic and unhelpful desire for a politics without emotion. Habermas is still right to point us towards some of the dangers of emotive citizenship, but opening the door to emotion does not necessitate giving up on rationality. Of course we still require some balance, and so we would be foolish to believe that either all emotions or all political fandoms are necessarily a good to be cherished. As Sandvoss (2005a) points out, fans can at times overload a text with meaning, rendering it “neutrosemic”—a potentially worrying development if the fan object is a political party or the nightly news. Similarly, a fan polity could restrict the free flow of ideas if fans became as rigidly sure of their facts and politics as, say, a Yankees fan is sure of his team’s divine superiority. Finally, too, the excesses of Fox News’s emotive and heavily biased format illustrate the dangers of incorporating too much emotion on the production end. Skeptics of emotion in politics, in other words, still have much to justifiably concern them. But at the same time, an absolute rationality would leave no room for caring, for personal or communal drive, nor for belief, engagement, or enjoyment, all of which are basic requirements for an active electorate.
Such emotions risk overlooking important realities, but this is where, why, and how fandom can help the news. With so many texts out there, fandom allows us to chart paths of value and meaning through this semiotic wilderness, and becomes a way of coping, a way of being able to move forward. While this is true of fandom and entertainment and/or fiction, it is also true of fandom, politics, and the news, for we also need paths through the wilderness of facts, policies, movements, issues, and spin before us. Some such paths are unhealthy, but perhaps it is by examining them in light of fan engagement that analysts will find better ways to account for them, and, ultimately, to challenge them. However, while both fears of the emotional and reverence for the rational are age-old, and at times justified, it is often emotions—and fandom, as a particular nexus of emotions—that point us forward, not just backward. This long-standing distrust of emotions and enjoyment is partially behind the pathologization and disapproval of fandom, but perhaps then by seeing fandom at times in, behind, allowing, and driving rationality, we might learn better to value not only emotions in politics but also fandom more generally, not as a magic tonic for citizenship—for that it is not—but as a constitutive element of it, for worse and for better.
NOTES
1. Dahlgren neatly defines the public sphere as “a space—a discursive, institutional, topographical space—where people in their roles as citizens have access to what can be metaphorically called societal dialogues, which deal with questions of common concern: in other words, with politics in the broad sense” (1995: 9).
2. I do not wish to brand other news as unimportant, however, for as Glynn (2000) and Hartley (1999) have argued, “soft” or tabloid news also offers its viewers political, meaningful commentary.
3. More deviously, leading on from both McKee’s and Hills’s arguments in this volume regarding fan-academic practice, we might even pose that our own universities’ media and journalism departments contain some of the most active news fans of all.