The fall of global news from Truth to Tamasha

Review by Vamsee Juluri
University of San Francisco

News as entertainment: The rise of global infotainment, Daya Kishan Thussu. London: Sage, 2007. ISBN 978-0-7619-6878-8. 214 pp.

I began reading this book in the aftermath of the saturation coverage of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai. I watched the attacks unfold on NDTV (carried here in the United States on satellite), and on CNN. I looked for updates on the local news channels, and on numerous Internet sources. What I was seeking was not just information, but really perspective; and as a South Asian, the perspective I sought was not merely being told that India and Pakistan are “rivals.” Instead, the sort of perspective I hoped we would see would contain an affirmation of certain realities in the avoidance of which the global news media seem to twist themselves into ever increasing contortions of inanity and platitude. Simply put, the coverage of the Mumbai attacks showed once again the full extent of the failed promise of the global 24/7 news environment we live in. In India, the live TV channels have been accused of giving away ongoing security operations to the terrorists and thereby endangering people. In the US, the coverage suffered from all the usual flaws; an almost exclusive focus on Western victims, a lack of context on South Asian geopolitics, reliance on too many crime and “m.o. experts,” and a flawed political correctness about the whole thing. Everywhere on television, the talking heads went on, as people died, and little understanding was gained by it perhaps, even as consolation.

News as Entertainment provides a strong critique of how and why failures such as these are going to be increasingly the norm and not the exception in the global news media. It is a timely reminder that news, that pervasive, sometimes addictive cultural feature of modernity, is not what we would like it to be. In an age when our interconnected and interdependent world could use better news (I cannot imagine saying “more”) as a cultural resource for global citizenship and for democratic participation, all we are faced with is the ever-widening decline of news into entertainment. This decline has had important consequences, as Thussu shows, ranging from the “theatricalization” of politics to the selling of policies of mass slaughter as “militainment.”

Thussu approaches this phenomenon from a broad historical and political-economy perspective. He begins with a discussion of the origins of “infotainment” as early as the days of the penny press and yellow journalism, and moves on to the more immediate concern, the mammoth global rise of commercial, ratings-driven, marketing-imagined, crime and celebrity obsessed, sensory-centric, superficial, loud, graphic-infested, ignorant, ahistorical, perpetual, all consuming form of news. He does this in a series of well-researched chapters that make for a compelling read. Two early chapters deal effectively with the globalization of news, documenting important causes such as deregulation, privatization, and commercialization, and then move on to a discussion of some revealing examples of the new infotainment around the world. In later chapters, he considers two important cases; the news media boom in India since liberalization (which has made it perhaps the “world’s biggest TV news bazaar” and turned news into something like Tamasha, a humorous folk tradition), and the role of the news media in the U.S. in the shadow of the so-called war on terror. He finally concludes with thoughts on the nature of imperialism and offers some hopeful possibilities for democratization of news in the future.

The book is one of the richest and most clearly written ones on the subject. It is strong on details, research, and gains from its choice of focus on television. Although Thussu covers other media as well, he is right in noting early on that despite all the mythology about the Internet, television remains the most pervasive and potent global mass medium. Its role in the transformation of news, and indirectly, politics, requires due attention and this book is an important contribution to that process. It will not only be useful as a textbook in classes on globalization and journalism, but also as a reference for media students in general. It contains many useful tables on news channels, their funding, and viewership shares, and also highlights the most salient aspects of other research, mentioning, for instance, useful facts like exactly how much the percentage of scandals as news has increased in recent years. 

Political-economy based books on the media sometimes lack “infotainment” appeal, but the sheer richness of information in this book made it a pleasure to read as well. Thussu also does well by not restricting his discussion to news as such, and also moves on to address the growing phenomenon of reality shows, including the controversy that broke out during Indian actor Shilpa Shetty’s appearance on Celebrity Big Brother in 2007. The only contention I have with the arguments in this book has to do with the discussion of terrorism. While Thussu’s critique of the media’s role in kowtowing to the US government’s push to invade Iraq is appropriate, his attempt to deconstruct “Islamic terrorism” as a myth of the Western media (an approach by no means restricted to him alone) suggests to me a need for greater thought by the critical media studies community in general on this question, especially in the wake of the brazen attacks on Mumbai. Another area for future researchers to consider in the light of this book would pertain to audience investment in the nature of mediated “reality” in general; we have a good understanding now of why infotainment exists and the forms it takes. Some investigation into the nature of its reception would be a welcome addition to the field.