Politainment in Egyptian and German Newspaper: A
Comparative Study
Sara S. Elmaghraby
*
Department of Mass Communication, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt
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Introduction
Politainment is according to Prior (2003)- the entertaining shocking
or scandalous aspects of politics, soft news offers people an
alternative that maximizes their utility because it combines
entertainment and information. Politainment reports on lifestyle,
wardrobe, scandals of superstars, and glamorous politicians. Several
new news formats blend information and entertainment emerged in
the two past decades and are labeled soft news and contrasted to
more traditional hard news formats. Because citizens have no direct
contact with the complicities of political life and systems, politainment
would make political life gain more sense and easy to be realized.
Politainment helps citizens focus on political themes and construct a
model of perception and meanings that are used by everyone. It
enhances and strengthens the political norms and that could help to
create a political culture. Do you know about the concept of
Mediokratie from Thomas Mayer? The colonization of the
politics system by the media system…Mayer is the perfect
counterpart of doerner´s politainment concept [1].
The studying of Politainment started with the term infotainment
which means the combination of information with entertainment. The
study of the political «infotainment» in specific emerged at the end of
the 90s. Academia started with television studies and moved to
studies on journalism and the Internet. Scholars were interested in
analyzing how reality is represented as a "show" and the preferences
of readers and their choice of news [2].
As media plays two important roles which are informing about
politics and entertainment, the term Politainment emerged to combine
both roles and functions of the media. It is a hybrid format like
Infotainment (a mix of Information and entertainment); Reality soaps
(a mix of Reality and fiction); Faction (a mix of fact and fiction); Doku-
Soaps (a mix of documentation and soaps); Edutainment (a mix of
education and entertainment); Infomercials (a mix of news and
commercials) and Advertorials (a mix of advertisements and
editorials) [3].
Politainment includes two subterms: political entertainment and
entertaining politics. Political entertainment is defined as the way the
entertainment industry tackles political topics in various entertainment
formats [4].
While entertaining politics refers to “how political actors capitalize
on their celebrity …. to enhance their images and to promote certain
issues”. Entertaining Politics "transforms statesmanship into
showmanship"; it is "where the wall between fact and fiction has
come down" [5].It also means that the important political events,
decisions, and are turning to be "useful subjects for anecdotes" [6].
Politicians feel to present themselves as entertainers. Lack of time to
give readers all the information they need, as well as the appealing
format of political programs, has helped in the creation of
Infotainment and Politainment. The conventional formats of political
magazines and news programs fall back and needed to change over
the years to win more interest and attention. Politicians as well try to
win readers and audiences by acting as entertainers or as media
activists [7].
Journal of Mass Communication and Journalism
Review Article
Volume 11:3, 2021
ISSN: 2165-7912 Open Access
*
Address to correspondence: Dr. Sara S. Elmaghraby, Department of Mass Communication, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt, E-mail:
Sara.s.elmaghraby@gmail.com
Copyright: © 2021 Elmaghraby SS. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license which permits
unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Received: March 04, 2021; Accepted: March 18, 2021; Published: March 25, 2021