Daya Kishan Thussu
Despite the astonishing growth of the Internet worldwide (about one quarter of the planet’s population is now online), television remains the most global and powerful of media. Its imagery crosses linguistic and national boundaries with relative ease, making it the most important purveyor of public information. This is particularly so in developing countries, where large sections of the population cannot read or write, yet holds true in Western contexts as well. The influence of television news on how everyday life is lived, from London to Washington, to Dhaka to São Paulo, is so profound it is difficult to comprehend.
The changing contours of television news have been a longstanding area of concern for critical scholars. News is not merely a media product, they point out, but a vehicle for engagement in the democratic process, one with significant implications for the conduct of domestic politics and international relations. A recent international public opinion poll, commissioned by GlobeScan in conjunction with the BBC, Reuters and the Media Centre, reported that national television news was the most trusted source of news (by 82 per cent) in ten major countries in 2006. International satellite TV news was trusted by 56 per cent of those surveyed, who similarly deemed this medium to be the most ‘important’ news source available to them (GlobeScan, 2006).
This chapter examines the growth of what has been aptly termed ‘infotainment’ – that is, the convergence of information and entertainment – found to varying degrees in the editorial output from television newsrooms across the globe. Part of the reason for this growth appears to be that private, commercially driven broadcasting, with its epicentre in the United States, has come to dominate television journalism globally. In the first instance, I shall briefly map the globalization of the commercial model of television news, arguing that in a market-driven, 24/7 broadcasting environment, television news tends towards infotainment. Soft news, lifestyle and consumer journalism have become pre-eminent. On this basis, I shall proceed to make the case that infotainment is contributing to the corporate colonization of the public sphere, undermining public journalism as well as public service broadcasting. This ‘soft’ news has engendered an important ideological dimension, in my view, helping to legitimize a neo-liberal ideology predicated on the superiority of free-market democracy.
The growing commercialism of the airwaves is the result of a number of factors – among them the privatization of global communication hard and software, together with the deregulation of broadcasting and the technological convergence between television, telecommunication and computing industries – which, taken together, have dramatically changed the ecology of broadcasting. The general shift from public to a ratings-conscious television, dependent on corporate advertising, has implications for news agendas and editorial priorities. While marketization has brought new energy and vitality to the broadcasting sector – evident in the mushrooming of news networks – it has also exposed journalism to the rules of the market to an ever greater extent, thus commodifying news and information.
One result of the proliferation of news outlets is a growing competition for audiences and, crucially, advertising revenue, at a time when interest in mainstream forms of news appears to be waning. As a report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (2006) in the US indicates, the audiences for network television peak-time news bulletins there have declined substantially, from 85 per cent of the television audience in 1969 to 29 per cent in 2005. The reasons for this decline are complex, but are partly a result of many – especially younger – viewers opting to receive their news from alternative sources, including bloggers (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2006).
Coincidental with the growing commercialization of television news is a perceived need to make it more entertaining. Indeed, this has become a crucial priority for broadcasters as they scramble to borrow and adapt characteristics from entertainment genres and modes of conversation that privilege an informal communicative style with its emphasis on personalities, style, storytelling skills and spectacle. News-gathering, particularly foreign news, is an expensive operation requiring high levels of investment and, consequently, media executives are under constant pressure to deliver demographically desirable audiences for news and current affairs programming to contribute to profits or at least avoid losses. In the US, the major news networks are controlled by conglomerates whose primary interest is in the entertainment business: ViacomParamount owns CBS News; ABC News is part of the Disney empire; CNN is a key component of AOL-Time-Warner (the world’s biggest media and entertainment conglomerate). Even Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, finds itself under the same corporate umbrella as Hollywood’s Twentieth Century Fox, amongst a vast array of other entertainment interests. This shift in ownership is similarly reflected at the level of content, that is, in extensive news coverage concerned with celebrities from the world of entertainment. These are supplemented by the new genre of reality TV and its relatives – docudramas, talk shows, court and crime enactments and rescue missions. In the process, symbiotic relationships between the news and new forms of current affairs and factual entertainment programmes have developed, blurring the boundaries between news, documentary and entertainment. Such hybridized ratings-driven programming feeds into and benefits from the 24/7 news cycle: providing a feast of visually arresting, emotionally-charged infotainment which sustains audience interest and keeps production costs low.
Infotainment – a neologism which emerged in the late 1980s to become a handy catchall for all that was wrong with contemporary television news – refers to an explicit genre-mix of ‘information’ and ‘entertainment’ in news and current affairs programming. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, infotainment is ‘broadcast material which is intended both to entertain and to inform.’ The phenomenon of infotainment denotes a type of television news where style triumphs over substance, the mode of presentation becoming more important than the content. This new news cannibalizes visual forms and styles borrowed from postmodernist TV commercials and an MTV-style visual aesthetics. Fast-paced visual action, computer-animated logos and eye-catching visuals are combined with sensationalist headlines, more often than not delivered by a glamorous anchor person. Such news, particularly on the rolling 24/7 channels, appears to be the answer to attracting the ‘me’ generation of media users, prone to channel hopping and zapping, with a preference for on-line and mobile news. This style of presentation, with its origins in the ratings-driven commercial television news culture of the US, is becoming increasingly global, made possible by a liberalized and privatized broadcasting environment and the creation of an international infrastructure for communication hardware.
Though the word infotainment is of relatively recent origin, the phenomenon it represents has a long tradition, from the broadside ballad to the ‘yellow’ and ‘tabloid press,’ as attested in most standard histories of journalism. Equally, the tension between informing and educating the public, on the one hand, and entertaining the crowd in the market place, on the other, has a venerable history.
The United States is widely perceived to be the home of the infotainment industry, starting with the penny press in the 1830s, exemplified by such publications as the New York-based Sun with a high quota of human interest stories – and which was sold for one penny (one cent) at a time when all other newspapers cost six cents (Mott, 1962). The penny press provided diversions for working people, as Neal Gabler has observed. ‘For a constituency being conditioned by trashy crime pamphlets, gory novels and overwrought melodramas,’ he writes, ‘news was simply the most exciting, most entertaining content a paper could offer, especially when it was skewed, as it invariably was in the penny press, to the most sensational stories.’ Moreover, he adds, ‘one might even say that the masters of the penny press invented the concept of news because it was the best way to sell their papers in an entertainment environment’ (cited in Gitlin, 2002: 51).
Schudson (1978), in his history of journalism in the US, notes that from the nineteenth century onwards a ‘journalism of entertainment’, with its distinct formats and style – accessible language and more pictures – became increasingly popular. This ‘journalism of entertainment’, underpinned by the rise of the advertising industry in the US, was exported to Europe and then to the rest of the world, as part of the globalizing American mass culture that began to circulate in the mid-nineteenth century. By the end of the century, advertising had become a powerful element in the making of the world’s most consumerist society, and in 1899, US-based advertising company J. Walter Thompson had established ‘a sales bureau’ in London. By the 1920s, the United States already boasted an advanced network of culture industries – including its formidable motion picture factories – that served to promote consumerist values.
From its very inception, broadcasting in the United States had a commercial remit: the US Radio Act of 1927 defined radio broadcasting as a commercial enterprise, funded by advertising. It was argued that public interest would be best served by largely unfettered private broadcasting; therefore the Act made no provision for supporting or developing non-commercial broadcasting (McChesney, 1993). Television, too, followed the market model, driven by advertising and dependent on ratings with the trio of television networks – CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), NBC (National Broadcasting Corporation) and ABC (American Broadcasting Corporation) – providing both entertainment and information. As the networks’ revenue was based on audience ratings, entertainment was an important ingredient of their programming (McChesney, 1993; Barkin, 2002). It is no coincidence that one of the world’s oldest celebrity talk programmes, The Tonight Show, has been successfully running on NBC since 1954.
In this television culture, the notion of the citizen as consumer is deeply entrenched. The idea that the ‘public interest’ should be defined only by market logic was clear during the first Reagan Presidency. In 1982, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Mark Fowler, wrote:
Communication policy should be directed toward maximizing the services the public desires. Instead of defining demand and specifying categories of programming to serve this demand, the Commission should rely on the broadcasters’ ability to determine the wants of their audience through the normal mechanisms of the marketplace. The public’s interest, then, defines the public interest’ (cited in Calabrese, 2005: 272).
By the late 1980s, concern was being expressed about declining political interest among citizens, leading to an apathetic or cynical public which some commentators believed was undermining quality journalism. The steady loss of audience and advertising forced US networks to adapt to the new multi-channel broadcasting environment, preferring soft’ features to hard news. Evidence of such trends was also found in a major study conducted in 1997 by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which examined the US mass media over the previous two decades. The study noted: ‘There has been a shift toward lifestyle, celebrity, entertainment and celebrity crime/scandal in the news and away from government and foreign affairs’. Looking specifically at television networks, it reported:
The greatest new shift in emphasis of network news was a marked rise in the number of stories about scandals, up from just one-half of one per cent in 1977 to 15 per cent in 1997. The next biggest shift in emphasis in network news is a rise in human interest and quality of life stories. On network TV, human interest and quality of life stories doubled from 8 per cent of the stories that appeared in 1977 to 16 per cent in 1997 (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 1998).
The commercialization of the US news media intensified during the 1990s, marking ‘a period of unprecedented decay in broadcast journalism’, when the networks ‘greased the slippery slope with pointed suggestions for news stories that were little more than promotions for upcoming entertainment shows’ (Marc and Thompson, 2005: 121). Consultants with backgrounds in marketing and advertising were employed by broadcast networks to spruce up news programmes, including ‘more soft-feature stories, more emotive delivery, more use of graphics, and the close attention to the youthful and attractive appearance of (female) on-air talent’ (Calabrese, 2005: 278). One major example of the encroachment of entertainment into news was the infamous O. J. Simpson story, marking, in the words of Kellner (2003) the ‘shift from journalism to infotainment’. Between 1 January and 29 September 1995, Kellner noted, the nightly news programmes on ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted 1,392 minutes to covering the Simpson trial, exceeding by a vast margin the reporting of the war in Bosnia (2003: 100–101).
The deregulation, liberalization and privatization of the airwaves that started in the late 1980s has had a profound impact on media systems across the globe, with the US-originated commercial model of television defining broadcasting globally in a post-Cold War world. Examining media systems in different cultural and political contexts, Hallin and Mancini (2004) noted the ‘triumph of the liberal model’, effectively adopted across the world ‘because its global influence has been so great and because neo-liberalism and globalization continue to diffuse liberal media structures and ideas’ (2004: 305). They noted that the differences among national media systems were ‘clearly diminishing’, and in their place a ‘global media culture is emerging, one that closely resembles the Liberal Model’, which is represented by central features of the American media system (2004: 294).
One key component of this change is the notion of choice reflected in the number of dedicated news networks – by 2009, there were more than 120 of them operating in the world. Economic globalization, with its attendant flexible and mobile workforce, contributed to a large and growing diasporic televisual market, which private networks have been quick to exploit, benefiting from the extension of satellite footprints and the growth of DTH (Direct-to-Home) broadcasting to feed into transnational geo-cultural spaces. Unlike state broadcasters, which tend to address traditional, territory-bound citizens, private networks are more interested in subscription-paying consumers, irrespective of nationality and citizenship (Chalaby, 2005).
State and regional broadcasting organizations have also jumped on the 24/7 news bandwagon, ensuring a presence on the global media scene and a vehicle for political public relations and diplomacy. While it would be going too far to describe some of these less than slick productions as infotainment, with their cheap and cheerful production values, their presence indicates the importance of being visible on the global image marketplace (see Table 33.1).
Among these are such regional networks as EuroNews (the 24/7 multi-lingual news consortium of Europe’s public service broadcasters) and the pan-Latin American TV channel Telesur launched in 2005. English-language news networks continue to have a privileged position in the production and distribution of global TV news, as shown by a spate of new English-language networks outside the Anglophone world: Russia Today, France 24, NDTV 24x7, Channel NewsAsia and Aljazeera English, are some key examples of this trend. Germany’s international broadcaster, Deutsche Welle TV, regularly broadcasts news bulletins in English, while Iran launched an English language channel, Press TV, in 2007. The expansion of CCTV-9, the English language 24-hour news network of China Central Television, reflects the recognition by the Beijing authorities of the importance of the English language as the key to success for global commerce and communication and their strategy to bring Chinese public diplomacy to a global audience.
As television news is an expensive business – especially of the 24/7 variety – and demands huge resources for programming, only large media conglomerates or wellfunded state organizations can hope to run successful global news channels. Even some well-established brands have struggled to survive. Britain’s Independent Television News (ITN), for example, had to close down the ITV News Channel (a round-theclock digital news channel) in 2005 for lack of sufficient revenue. Fierce competition between proliferating news networks for ratings at a time when broadcasters are struggling to increase market share, as well as a bigger slice of a diminishing advertising cake, has prompted them to provide news in an entertaining manner. Broadcasters have had little choice but to adapt their news operations to this changing ethos in order to try to retain their viewers or to acquire them anew.
In Western Europe, excessive commercialism has posed a threat to public-service monopolies or duopolies, with an explosion of new private channels. News television, including business news channels, have proliferated in one of the world’s richest media markets – from 6 in 1990 to 119 in 2005 – while documentary channels have grown from just 2 in 1990 to 108 in 2005. In Britain, with a well-established tradition of publicservice broadcasting – exemplified by the BBC but including commercial broadcasters such as Independent Television (ITV) and Channel 4 – and a record of providing quality programmes on national and international public affairs, TV journalism has also been affected by the trend to infotainment. The role of entertainment – the last of the Reithian triad of ‘informing, educating and entertaining’ the public – gained ever greater prominence during the 1990s. One indication of this occurred when the BBC’s flagship current affairs series Panorama (broadcast since 1953 and which set the standards for current affairs reporting for half a century) was shifted to a late weekend slot, its content diluted in an effort to retain a steadily declining viewership (though it was re-launched in 2007, in a prime time slot, albeit reduced by ten minutes to 30 minutes). For its part, ITV replaced long-running and respected current affairs and investigative programmes such as World in Action (1963–65 and 1967–98) and This Week (1955–92) with more popular peak-time programming – drama and reality TV slots. In other parts of Europe, commercialism was deftly exploited for political power. In Italy, infotainment-driven private television catapulted Silvio Berlusconi from a businessman to the office of the Prime Minister, elected first in 1994 (for seven months); in 2001; and then again in 2008.
In Eastern Europe and parts of the former Soviet Union, the triumph of market capitalism has inevitably undermined the state-driven model of public broadcasting. State broadcasters were exposed as little more than propaganda networks, losing all credibility. The idea of news operating in a marketplace was normalized in a new world shaped by the market. As a former press secretary to the president of the Czech Republic noted, ‘most of the formerly serious Czech journalism has moved into infotainment. Many relevant media have traded a comprehensive, analytical coverage for a soft-news, entertainment approach driven by television culture …’ (Klvana, 2004: 40–41). A study of journalism in Russia found that the ‘media aggressively implants hedonistic morals, paying huge attention to the entertainment genre’ with young journalists ‘willingly accepting’ the ‘role of entertainer’ (Pasti, 2005: 109).
In India, the world’s most crowded television news bazaar (by 2009, the country had 65 dedicated news channels), infotainment is rampant. Deregulation of the Indian television news sector has partly been responsible for this boom, as private investors – both national and transnational – have sensed new opportunities for revenue and influence by going into the television news business. The growing competition among these channels has contributed to the tendency to tabloidization of television news, encapsulated by what I have described elsewhere as the three Cs – cinema, crime and cricket – of Indian infotainment (Thussu, 2007b). Prominent among these, and one which reflects infotainment trends elsewhere in the world, is the apparent obsession of almost all news channels with celebrity culture, which in India centres on Bollywood – the world’s largest film industry in terms of number of films produced annually. The power of Bollywood to sell television news is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the way Rupert Murdoch’s Indian entertainment network Star Plus used the Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan as the host of Kaun Banega Crorepati, an Indian version of the successful British game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, giving its launch in 2000 extensive coverage on Star News. The show dramatically changed Murdoch’s fortunes in India, securing an average of 40 out of the top 50 shows every week for Star Plus. The third series of the programme, launched in 2007 and hosted by the leading Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, retained very high ratings, thanks partly to the unprecedented publicity, including on Star News, making Star Plus the most popular private channel in the country. Other networks have realized the selling power of Bollywood and most now broadcast regular programmes about its glamour and glitz. Star News has a daily programme, Khabar Filmi Hai (The News about Cinema), full of celebrity-obsessed reporting and film-based gossip. Such ‘Bollywoodization’ is an increasing trend across the news channels.
In China, where the transition from Maoist state-controlled and propagandist media to a state-managed marketization has had a different trajectory to that of former communist countries in Europe, new ‘capitalist ways’ have prompted the media to ‘soften the propagandist edges’ and replace it with ‘soft’, entertaining and apolitical news. This type of news is perceived to be particularly appealing to a mass audience and ‘sets the stage for profit’ (Chan, 2003). Phoenix infonews channel, partly owned by Murdoch’s News Corporation, regularly runs an infotainment programme, ‘Easy Time, Easy News’, which the company labels as ‘soft and diverting news’. Meanwhile in the Arab world, where television has traditionally been controlled by governments, globalization of infotainment has brought what one commentator has called a ‘liberal commercial television’, adding that ‘Arab viewers are exposed to American-style news formats and orientations that draw on sensational and technically alluring features’ (Ayish, 2002: 151).
The primacy of ratings-driven media, as this brief selection of examples suggests, is well established across the world. Infotainment, with its privileging of soft stories as sensationalist spectacles, translates into handsome revenues.
Here it is worth pausing to pose some key questions. Is this ‘populist’ version of news, with its emphasis on consumer journalism, sports and entertainment, diluting television news? To what extent is it fair to claim that this tendency to move away from a public-service news agenda to privatized infotainment – privileging information and education over the entertainment value of news – is actually harmful for democratic discourse? Or is this type of broadcast news, in fact, contributing to what might be regarded as a democratization of the public sphere, as some supporters of popular communication paradigms have argued. In their view, claims about ‘tabloidization’ or a ‘dumbing down’ of news content risk reaffirming an elitist view of journalism (Hartley, 1999).
Such debates have exercised media theorists for generations. Years before debates about the globalization of infotainment emerged, critics such as Adorno (1991) warned that the ‘mechanisms of television’ were creating a false global ‘feel good’ factor, predicated on the supremacy of the market as defined by the West. Postman (1985), in his influential book Amusing Ourselves to Death, formulated the thesis that public discourse in the United States was assuming the form of entertainment. He argued that the ‘epistemology of television’ militated against deeper knowledge and understanding since television’s conversations promote ‘incoherence and triviality’. Television, he believed, ‘spoke in only one persistent voice – the voice of entertainment’ (Postman, 1985: 84).
I would argue that global infotainment works as a powerful, seductive discourse of diversion, taking attention away from – and thereby displacing from the airwaves – such grim realities and excesses of neo-liberal capitalism as witnessed in the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. At the same time, it contributes to the globalization of a profligate and unsustainable consumerist lifestyle. With the global circulation of Americana and its localized versions, this capacity to divert and deflect has in fact increased many fold, despite appearances to the contrary (Thussu, 2006; Thussu 2007c).
Jacques Ellul (1965), in his excellent study of propaganda, makes an important distinction between an overtly political rendering of it and a subtler conception – namely, a propaganda of ‘integration’ represented by popular cinema, television, advertising and public relations – which unconsciously moulds individuals to conform to dominant societal ideas (Ellul, 1965). The growing power of global media conglomerates and their local clones can promote a softer version of corporate propaganda masquerading as infotainment, reaching billions of people in their living rooms. Governments across the globe appear to be unconcerned by the growth of infotainment, perhaps because it can keep the masses diverted with various versions of ‘reality TV’ and consumerist and entertaining information, displacing serious news and documentaries, which might focus on the excesses of neo-liberalism. In India, for example, the woeful lack of coverage of rural poverty, of regular suicides by small farmers (more than 100,000, between 1993 and 2003, the decade of neo-liberal ‘reform’, according to government figures), and the negligible reporting of developmental issues, such as health and hygiene, educational and employment equality (India has the world’s largest population of child labour at the same time as having a vast pool of unemployed young people), demonstrates that such grim stories do not translate into ratings and are displaced by the diversion of infotainment.
The national elites – part of a transnational class in its infancy in many developing countries and in transition economies – play a critical role in the establishment and popularity of global infotainment. The transnational elite is susceptible to the charms of neo-liberalism, as it benefits from having closer ties with the powerful core of this tiny minority, largely based in the West, as the Fortune 500 listings annually attest. The media system, as McChesney (1999) has reminded us, ‘is not only closely linked to the ideological dictates of the business-run society, it is also an integral element of the economy’ (1999: 281, italics in original). Infotainment conglomerates are part of the dominant economic forces in neo-liberal societies and operate within what Ellul (1965) refers to as a ‘total’ and ‘constant’ propaganda ‘environment’, which can render the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed. He noted that although the educated classes believed that they are not affected by propaganda, in fact, they were more vulnerable as they consumed a greater quantity of news than the general population, and engaged regularly with processes of political communication. In the context of globalization of infotainment, it is the Westernized, mostly young and middle-class social groups, with aspirations to a consumerist lifestyle, which engage with neo-liberal media. Infotainment is more conducive to this new generation with its individualistic worldview, social and geographical mobility and transnational working environment.
The growing presence of what I have described elsewhere as ‘glocal Americana’ (Thussu, 2007c) is feeding into and creating a media culture in which neo-liberalism is taking deep roots. And it is because of this ‘constant’ and soft propaganda that neo-liberalism has been embraced, almost universalized by dominant sections of the global elites, who have come to regard its basic tenets – private (efficient and therefore preferable) vs. public (corrupt and inefficient); individualism (to be applauded) vs. community (to be decried); market (good) vs. state (bad) – as undisputed opposites which fall within the rubric of ‘commonsense’.
As Harvey (2003) has argued, neo-liberalism has become a hegemonic discourse with pervasive effects on ways of thought and political-economic practices, making it part of the commonsense view of the world. The globalization of neo-liberal ideology and the near global reach and circulation of televised infotainment have provided neo-liberalism with a powerful opportunity to communicate directly with the world’s populace, as more and more global infotainment conglomerates are localizing their content to reach beyond the ‘Westernized’ elites.
At a time when infotainment becomes entrenched in news conventions around the world, the US experience is likely to become widely acceptable. This will be to the considerable benefit of the right-wing political agendas, predicated on the supremacy of the market. The German media sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who saw the mass media as one of the key cognitive systems of modern society, posed a crucial question: ‘How is it possible to accept information about the world and about society as information about reality when one knows how it is produced’? (Luhmann, 2000: 122, italics in original). As the global financial crisis, unleashed in 2008, exposes the limitations of neo-liberal ideology, Luhmann’s question acquires added salience and urgency.
Adorno, Theodor (1991) The Cultural Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge.
Ayish, Mohammed (2002) Political Communication on Arab World Television: Evolving Patterns. Political Communication,19:137–154.
Barkin, Steve (2002) American Television News: The Media Marketplace and the Public Interest. New York: M.E. Sharpe.
Calabrese, Andrew (2005) The Trade in Television News, in Janet Wasko (ed.) A Companion to Television. Oxford: Blackwell.
Castells, Manuel (2004) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 2: The Power of Identity, second edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Chalaby, Jean (ed.) (2005) Transnational Television Worldwide – Towards a New Media Order. London: I. B. Tauris.
Chan, Joseph Man (2003) Administrative Boundaries and Media Marketization: A Comparative Analysis of the Newspaper, TV and Internet Markets in China’, pp. 159–76 in C.C. Lee (ed.) Chinese Media, Global Contexts. London: Routledge.
Ellul, Jacques (1965) Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York: Knopf, originally published in French as Propagandes in 1962.
Gitlin, Todd (2002) Media Unlimited: How the Torrents of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives: New York: Metropolitan Books.
GlobeScan (2006) BBC/Reuters/Media Center Poll: Trust in the Media, released 3 May. Available at: www. globescan.com/news_archives/bbcreut.html
Hallin, Daniel and Mancini, Poulo (2004) Comparing Media Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hartley, John (1999) Uses of Television. London: Routledge.
Harvey, David (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kellner, Douglas (2003) Media Spectacle. New York: Routledge.
Klvana, Tomás (2004) New Europe’s Civil Society, Democracy, and the Media Thirteen Years After: The Story of the Czech Republic. Harvard Journal of Press/Politics, 9(3):40–55.
Luhmann, Niklas (2000) The Reality of the Mass Media. Cambridge: Polity.
Marc, David and Thompson, Robert (2005) Television in the Antenna Age – A Concise History. Oxford: Blackwell.
McChesney, Robert (1993) Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of US Broadcasting, 1928–1935. New York: Oxford University Press.
McChesney, Robert (1999) Rich Media, Poor Democracy – Communication Politics in Dubious Times. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Mott, Frank Luther (1962) American Journalism: A History: 1690–1960, third edition. New York: Macmillan.
Pasti, Svetlana (2005) Two Generations of Contemporary Russian Journalists. European Journal of Communication, 20(1): 89–115.
Postman, Neil (1985) Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Viking.
Project for Excellence in Journalism (1998) Changing Definitions of News, March 6, Available at: http://www.journalism.org/resources/research/reports/
Project for Excellence in Journalism (2006) The State of the News Media: An Annual Report on American Journalism, 2006. Journalism.org. Available at http://stateofthemedia.org/2006
Schudson, Michael (1978) Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. New York: Harper.
Thussu, Daya Kishan (2006) International Communication – Continuity and Change, second edition. London: Hodder Arnold.
Thussu, Daya Kishan (2007a) News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment. London: Sage.
Thussu, Daya Kishan (2007b) The ‘Murdochization’ of News? The Case of Star TV in India. Media, Culture & Society, 29(3): 593–611.
Thussu, Daya Kishan (2007c) Mapping Global Media Flow and Contra-Flow, in Daya Kishan Thussu (ed.) Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-Flow. London: Routledge.