News As Entertainment

Richly detailed and empirically grounded, this first book-length study of infotainment and its globalization by a leading scholar of global communication, offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of this emerging phenomenon. Going beyond - both geographically and theoretically - the ?dumbing down? discourse, largely confined to the Anglo-American media, the book argues that infotainment may have an important ideological role, a diversion in which ?soft news? masks the hard realities of neo-liberal imperialism.