Book Reviews

Thussu, D. K. (2007). News as Entertainment: The Rise of

Global Infotainment. London: Sage.

Journal of
Communication Inquiry
Volume 33 Number 2
April 2009 185-191
2009 SAGE Publications
http://jci.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com

DOI: 10.1177/0196859908329656

News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment is a timely and comprehensive analysis of a phenomenon that is increasingly difficult to ignore for scholars
of global media today. This phenomenon is the widespread adaptation of the 24/7
news format, first popularized by CNN in the United States and gradually adopted
around the world as a universal news format. While its global spread has been
known, the gradual evolution of this genre, its implications for the consumers of this
format, and the successive links in the chain that have led to its adaptation deserve a
much-needed closer analysis. In doing so, Daya Kishan Thussus book makes an
immense contribution to the existing literature on global media flows and, more
importantly, unravels the modalities of power within those flows.
News as Entertainment is an excavation of the preconditions upon which the
global architecture of soft news is founded. The book claims that although the surge
in this global format is a relatively recent phenomenon, it has long been in the making. Thussu traces the origins of this process in a historical moment when news first
became a commodity and hence a means to profit. The rise of the penny press was
one of the first encounters between news and the free market, and the former has
been unable to escape the Faustian clutches of the latter ever since. Consequently,
spiced up through sensational yellow journalism, narrativized as newsreels before
film screenings, and jazzed up to compete with MTV over the years, news in its
global 24/7 format is entertainment.
To argue otherwise would be to ignore the staggering evidence that Thussu
painstakingly accumulates. He shows us how competition for eyeballs among news
channels from India to Latin America and from Russia to the Mideast has trivialized
news at the expense of exaggerating its dramatic aspects. He calls them 24 hour
news factories and compiles a seemingly endless list of news channels around the
worldall of them striving to compete in a fierce market. Since good journalism
often does not mean good business, celebrity news, gossip, and other forms of soft
news have overshadowed the Habermasian ideal of a rational critical debate. To be
sure, this transformation, for many media systems, has not been as much a fall from
grace as a leap from the frying pan to the fire. This is so because what these infotainment networks have often replaced were state-controlled government mouthpieces of yore.
Thussu reminds us that the story of this gradual merger between free market and
news cannot be divorced from the story of the emergence of laissez-faire capitalism
as the default policy choice around the world. This policy choice has been embraced
often voluntarily but often also through subtle coercion and trade negotiations. An
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186 Journal of Communication Inquiry

extension of these free-market policies in the cultural realm has resulted in a global
order where infotainment conglomerates lead the way and are widely copied in their
style and format by local news networks. These conglomerates are aided by the formidable control exercised by the United States both in the realm of media technologies (such as satellites) and in the realm of content generation.
As an example of how the rise of global infotainment is manifested in the local
realm, Thussu brings us a detailed analysis of the recently exploding news market in
India. It is, he claims, the country with the largest number of news channels in the
world and one of the worlds six biggest TV marketplaces. But the large number of
channels is precisely what has worked to the detriment of good journalism.
Competition has meant that the three Cs of Indian infotainmentcinema, cricket,
and crimehave often become an expedient strategy to attract eyeballs. Almost all
news channels have shows exclusively dedicated to the three Cs. A sign of desperation to get viewer ratings is seen in the liberal use of terms, such as breaking news
and exclusive, that are often tagged along with news reports of the supernatural and
the bizarre. As a specific example, Thussu cites a 2-hour discussion on a news channel about a man who claimed to have returned from the afterlife. The story gripped
the imagination of almost all 24/7 news channels.
While India is the example that Thussu deals with in most detail, the central claim
of his argument is a global one. The trends that he spots and the connections he
forges do not limit themselves to a specific geographical region. The commodification and the aestheticization of news may have arisen in the United States, but it is a
global phenomenon today. War in general but the recent war on terror in particular
best exemplifies how the drive to profit commodifies news. Thussu calls this the
foxification of war reporting. Even though Fox News is an American channel, its
influence is global and is most visible in how news channels around the world have
covered the ongoing war in Iraq. The effect of this approach has ensured that terrorism is visible everywhere in real-time, all the time. (p. 129). The genesis of this
approach lies in what Thussu calls a public relations coup for Washington that led to
embedded journalism during the war in Iraq. Not only did embedding create a competition among the channels to get the most dramatic and engaging footage of the
war, but it also led to an identification between the reporters and the army wherein
journalists often used words such as us and we when talking about the military.
Instead of being neutral analysts and observers, the reporters became participants. It
is not Thussus point that there has been no criticism of the war in the media but
rather that spectacle has taken precedence over serious journalism.
A pertinent question to ask is, What does this global rise of infotainment represent?
He uses Guy Debords idea of the society of the spectacle and Jacques Elluls more
subtle conception of propaganda (a propaganda of integration) to claim that the erasure of the distinction between news and entertainment represents a continuation of the
older hegemonic structures of the world. Since it seems less coercive than the older,
more visible structures of power, it is perhaps more pernicious. If religion was the
means to stupefy the masses for long, the question Thussu asks is, Can global info-

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tainment be the twenty-first century version of such acts of cultural sedation? (p. 151).
By appealing to the voyeur and the prurient in us, by making us live in a make-believe
world, and by distracting us from the issues that need our urgent attention, the answer
to that question, for Thussu, would be a resounding yes.
At the center of News as Entertainment is an idealist core that drives its argument.
Its primary concern is as much about what has become of news as it is about what
this new avatar of news has displaced. The book claims that the rise of infotainment
represents a lamentable distraction from the real issues that deserve the muchneeded attention of the world. Were it not for the all-consuming joyride of infotainment, our attention would perhaps have been focused on other issues that need
intervention. There are several examples of such issues in the book, and among them,
the case of widespread farmer suicides in India is a particularly poignant one. He claims
that over 100,000 farmers have committed suicide in rural India in the 10-year period
between 1993 and 2003, but in a media dazzled by business tycoons, charismatic
and smooth talking CEOs and American or Americanized celebrities (p. 111),
coverage of these suicides has been sporadic and scant, at best. It is in this oftensurfacing pathos that the readers best get a sense of the damage that a culture of
infotainment can inflict. It can distract not merely public attention but public policy
and can render large sections of humanity incapable of buying the goods advertised
on these networks irrelevant and inconsequential.
Thussus indictment of the global news architecture is overarching and total. He
concedes that in an age where hegemony is rarely talked about without resistance,
positing such a critique is perhaps unfashionable. But he defends this approach and
says, Nevertheless, it is an argument that needs to be made and made unambiguously and without apology (p. 14). This would perhaps be unconvincing for critics
who dismiss the old cultural imperialism thesis as too overarching and lacking in
evidence, were it not for the countless instances he provides to show how in its global
incarnation, 24/7 news has become a tragic caricature of itself. Moreover, the last
chapter of the book anticipates the critics by showing how emerging global opinion
and networks of social movements are indeed posing a challenge to hegemonic
forces. These social movements use the very networking tools deployed by media
conglomerates that peddle infotainment.
Despite these gestures toward hope, the dominant lesson one carries away from
this book is an understanding of the operation of power in the global cultural realm.
Unraveling this mode of power is crucial in order to better posit a counterargument to
the celebratory accounts of globalization. Implicit in Thussus unapologetic and unrelenting critique is the notion that pessimism about the present is in fact the ultimate
form of optimism, since it only arises from a vision of a better possible future.
Sangeet Kumar
University of Iowa

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