Election News Coverage and Entertaining Politics: A content analysis of infotainment characteristics in Canadian newspapers’ federal election coverage Robert N. Marinov A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master’s degree in Political Science School of Political Studies Faculty of Social Sciences University of Ottawa © Robert N. Marinov, Ottawa, Canada, 2020 ii Acknowledgments I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis supervisor, Dr. Paul Saurette, whose unparalleled knowledge, kindness, and analytical mind have helped me in immeasurable ways to learn and grow as an academic, and without whom this research would never have been possible. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Daniel Stockemer, whose insights and friendly encouragement have helped me throughout my Master’s degree and especially in the early stages of development of this research. I would also like to thank Dr. Luc Turgeon for his invaluable feedback and discussions, as well as my professors in the University of Ottawa’s School of Political Studies, who have inspired me during my studies in diverse ways and more profoundly than I think they will ever know. As well, I offer my deepest thank you to my beautiful partner, Tamara Miranda, for her love, support, and constant encouragement over the past two years, without which I would have faced infinitely more difficulties in completing my research and studies. And finally, I’d like to sincerely thank my family and friends in Kelowna, Montana, Calgary, Montreal, Gatineau, and Ottawa, whose love and support have been invaluable, and which I only hope myself capable of returning in kind. Without you all, I would have been lost in a web of data tables and have never found my way out. iii Table of Contents 1. Introduction p. 1 2. Literature Review p. 5 2.1 What is “Infotainment”? Historical Origins and Development p. 7 2.2 Soft News Programming p. 12 2.3 Traditional News Media p. 15 2.4 Media Systems & Global Infotainment p. 19 2.5 Interaction between Trajectories p. 23 2.6 Studying the Canadian Context p. 26 3. Methodology & Case Study p. 28 3.1 Primary Research Questions p. 30 3.2 Interpretive Method of Analysis p. 30 3.3 Defining Infotainment: Conceptualisation and Operationalisation p. 31 3.4 Defining ‘Serious’/Informative News p. 34 3.5 Overall Infotainment Scale p. 36 3.6 Infotainment Scale p. 37 3.7 Case Study & Data Collection Methods p. 38 3.8 Filtering Criteria p. 40 3.9 Final Dataset p. 41 3.10 Hypotheses p. 41 3.11 Final Note: Limitations of the Methodology p. 43 4. Results of the Study p. 47 4.1 Overview of the Main Findings: Infotainment Scale Results p. 47 4.2 Towards a Qualitative Understanding of Canadian Newspapers’ Infotainment Format p. 52 4.2.1 Personalisation p. 52 4.2.1.1 Personalising the Political Context p. 54 4.2.1.2 Anchoring Interpretation p. 61 4.2.2 Sensationalisation p. 65 4.2.2.1 Politics on the Surface p. 67 iv 4.2.2.2 Sensational Conflict p. 70 4.2.2.3 Sensational Scandal p. 76 4.2.2.4 Framing & Priming the ‘Blackface/Brownface’ Scandal p. 80 4.2.3 Decontextualisation p. 88 4.2.3.1 Lacking Context p. 91 4.2.3.2 Opinions & Speculations p. 93 4.2.3.3 The Fine Line between Reality and Media Reality p. 98 4.2.3.4 The Strategic Game p. 101 4.2.4 ‘Serious’/Informative News p. 106 4.3 Concluding Notes on the Findings p. 110 5. Discussion & Conclusions p. 111 5.1 Understanding the Infotainment Format in Canadian Newspapers p. 111 5.2 Implications of the Findings: Information, Power-Making, and the Citizen p. 114 5.3 Findings in Comparison to the Infotainment & Media Literature p. 123 5.4 Conclusions & Areas for Future Research p. 128 APPENDIX 1: Detailed Coding Dictionary p. 132 APPENDIX 2: Data Collection Numbers p. 147 APPENDIX 3: Quantitative Results Table p. 148 APPENDIX 4: Comparative Examples of Scandal Coverage p. 150 APPENDIX 5: Infotainment Scale Comparative Examples p. 154 APPENDIX 6: Cross-Tabs of Decontextualisation Scale with Personalisation & Sensationalisation Scales p. 160 News Items Cited in this Study p. 162 Bibliography p. 168 Marinov 1 1. Introduction “Cynical attributions of candidate motives, relying on polls to advance a campaign story, and employing the language of wars or games in describing the campaign all seem to impede information acquisition by readers. Even when only one of these several elements of game-schematic coverage is employed, a reduction in information retention occurs.” - Nicholas A. Valentino et al. (2001, p. 105) “Media politics is the conduct of politics in and by the media . in our historical context, politics is primarily media politics. [M]edia politics is, in fact, one major component of a broader form of politics – informational politics, the use of information and information processing as a decisive tool of power-making.” - Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (2009, pp. 193-97) “Let the races begin, in all 338 ridings from coast to coast to coast.” - Brian Platt, National Post article, Sept. 11, 2019 (Platt, 11 Sept., 2019) Our contemporary era is one of rapid digitization of political, economic, and social discourses. More than ever in our history, social and political life are mediated through growing networks and apparatuses of communications technologies. The analysis of politics and processes of democratic power- making must, then, also account for the (techno-)infrastructural bases of contemporary political discourse and their influences on both citizens and political systems. As celebrated media critic, Manuel Castells (2009), has argued, today’s politics is fundamentally a form of “media politics,” wherein the dominant, every-day forms of political discourse and power-making take place through networks of mass communications and media technologies. In other words, the exchange of information and the production of power relations between citizens and decision-makers takes place predominantly within media networks. Insofar as this is the case, we may locate institutions such as the news media as central pillars of the democratic power-making process. The analysis of politics within a media-politics format is thus the analysis of information and its production, consumption, and mediation. Information becomes, in a sense, the currency of democratic politics and of citizens’ ability to make informed decisions when electing representatives and undertaking other forms of political action. In light of this contemporary reality, many Marinov 2 researchers have sought to scrutinize the quality and scope of the information provided to citizens through some of the more traditional media networks (e.g. the news media) in order to determine the influence thereof on processes of democratic power- and decision-making. Within this context, the study of news media and political communications has turned increasingly towards the analysis of what has been called “infotainment” - a portmanteau which, as its name suggests, describes the admixture of (politically) informative materials and formats with entertaining and sensational ones. Developing primarily out of the commercial broadcasting system of the United States, the spread of infotainment formats has been widely viewed as a result of the news media weakening its public-interest and political reporting in favour of more sensational, entertaining, and emotionally-arousing news and public affairs coverage. A bourgeoning literature has established the global reach of this infotainment phenomenon, sparking ongoing academic debates over the empirical and normative implications for citizens and democratic systems. Recent scholarship has argued that contemporary news media coverage of politics, notably in its market-driven, infotainment formats, has been a key factor in the framing and sensationalisation of winning candidates for political office, such as Donald Trump in America (Azari, 2016; Lawrence & Boydstun, 2017; Serazio, 2018) and Justin Trudeau in Canada (Hadfield, 2017; Lalancette & Cormack, 2018; Marland, 2018). Infotainment has thus become a popular and highly contested subject of study and debate across academic disciplines, and by journalists, politicians, and citizens more broadly. Captivating rhetoric and antics, charismatic celebrity images, and sensational speeches, slogans, and sound bites are packaged together within the infotainment news formats of the twenty-first century, resulting in a phenomenon that implicates populations worldwide and academics of varying backgrounds. However, despite its importance and a proliferating base of literature, infotainment remains highly incoherent and multifaceted, both as a concept and a field of study. This is evidenced by the numerous terms that have now been coined or adapted to speak, generally, of a similar phenomenon: these include, in part, infotainment, politainment, militainment, edutainment, argutainment, tabloidization, sensationalisation, soft vs. hard news, the softening of news, eroding of journalistic boundaries, the decline Marinov 3 of journalism, and several other similar terms. This array of concepts, while lacking standardisation and conceptual clarity, has allowed infotainment researchers to analyse several developments and synergies between journalism, politics, entertainment media, information and communication technologies, and the many hybrid forms of mass communication deriving therefrom. This broadly-defined field is thus well poised to analyse and understand the rapidly changing social, political, and media environment of the twenty-first century. Infotainment has been heavily researched in the United States, and to a lesser degree in Western Europe (Aalberg et al., 2010; Carrillo & Ferré-Pavia, 2013; Ferré-Pavia & Gaya-Morla, 2011), Latin America (Alonso, 2016; Hallin & Mellado, 2018), and Asia (Shirk, 2007; Taniguchi, 2007, 2011; Thussu, 2007a, 2007b). While these studies have made important inroads into documenting the global rise and spread of infotainment, the Canadian media context still lacks a preliminary base of comprehensive infotainment research. A few studies of infotainment have been undertaken in Canada (e.g.