Abstract

ECHEVERRIA, Martín. Journalistic infotainment in election coverage. The case of presidential debates. Convergencia [online]. 2017, vol.24, n.74, pp.113-136. ISSN 2448-5799.  https://doi.org/10.29101/crcs.v0i74.4384.

Journalistic coverage of elections is increasingly about conflict, scandals, horse race coverage and gaffes, a phenomenon called infotainment, which is detrimental to the political content of elections, this is to say, the candidates’ proposals and leader profiles. To assess the scope of these tendencies in the Mexican press, we focused our research on the coverage of presidential debates in the 2012 campaign, events with profuse political content, and undertook a content analysis of five national newspapers to measure framings related to infotainment (N=209 units). We found that the coverage was focused on the conflict between actors and performance assessment of the event, with little reference to the candidates’ political positions and profiles. Such treatment is detrimental to the potential of civic formation of the debates, a significant feature of democracy.

Keywords : infotainment; elections; content analysis; press; debates.

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