Who's Afraid of Infotainment?

Many authors in Europe and the USA claim that commercialization and competition in broadcasting lead to a downgrading of political information and, even worse, to a crisis in political communication highlighted by the increasing reliance of television news media on entertainment formats. The justification for this `infotainment scare' is put to the test by an overview of research on politics in television news in a number of (Northern) European countries, a first-hand research project on the campaign communications in the 1994 elections in the Netherlands, and a discussion of the implicit and explicit assumptions the scare is based on.