Political infotainment and emotional connectivity on YouTube

Abstract

This research work focuses on the study of political “infotainment”, a genre related to television (Schudson, 1999; Blumler, Kavanagh, 1999; Brants, 1998; Delli Carpini, Williams, 2001; Holtz-Bacha, Norris, 2001; Baum, 2002), but which in recent years has achieved a presence in other mass media, including the Internet. This work shows the presence of a large number of political videos, which meet the features of infotainment on the YouTube platform. Specifically, an analysis is presented of the most popular videos according to the number of times they have been viewed, when information on the following political representatives of European politics in 2011 is searched on YouTube: Nicolas Sarkozy (France), Silvio Berlusconi (Italy), Gordon Brown (United Kingdom) or José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (Spain), as well as the USA President Barack Obama (EEUU). The aim of this study is to determine wether the television infotainment phenomenon has been transferred to the Net on the international scene. For this purpose, 100 videos were studied from the perspective of Spanish researchers, which corresponded to the twenty most watched videos of each of the following political leaders or ex-leaders: Gordon Brown, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Obama and Rodríguez Zapatero. The study carried out is a quantitative and descriptive analysis of the content. The analysis template has been designed using independent and dependent variables, with multiple choice or dichotomous answers. The data confirm that Political infotainment is a genre related to television which has been transferred to Internet. However, on Internet these videos emerge as a hybrid genre because they combine some of the videos produced and broadcast by television, and custom modifications of the people posting these videos on YouTube.