Pter Csig:

Downbreaking News Toward a Dramaturgical Approach to Popular Media and Public Communication

1. Introduction: when factual media becomes object of popular taste judgements

The tabloidization of news programmes has not ceased provoking heated debates whether popularized routine news coverage (still) satisfies the needs of democratic citizenship (Graber 1994). However, although these debates have not lost of their intensity, an increasing amount of data and commentary suggests that TV news have lost the power and significance it was so self-evidently attributed in the past era of broadcast television. Accordingly, the above question whether popular news are disabling or enabling, so central in normative debates (Sparks 2000), has been obsoleted by recent developments in media. With the rise of a new post-documentary (Corner 2000) discourse in popular factual media on the one hand, and the dissolution of evening newscasts audience, on the other (Turow 2003), the standard TV news format increasingly presents itself as an enclave in the programme flow, inherited from a past media era. Of course, news producers complaints about their difficulties in keeping audience attention date back to the beginnings of popular TV. Seen from this point of view, intensifying pressures to offer highly appealing content represent only another step of a long process. True enough, the conventional editorial strategy of news makers has always been focused on calculating the dose of attractive content which is enough to grab audience attention. However, increasing market pressures and fragmentation in popular media obsolete this strategy. Editorial attempts to adjust TV news to the supposed requirements of competitive popular media have not successfully hindered the decline of the standard genre of news.1 As I will argue, this failure results from deeper, structural factors which shape the uses of popular factual media in the new media environment. I will also argue that the decline of TV news presents itself less in shrinking audience ratings than in the low efficiency of the genre to affect the audience, in comparison to infotainment programmes.

The following paper addresses news increasing rootlessness in the recent environment of popular media where highly dramatized programs compete for audience applause. What stands behind TV news loss of importance is, it will be argued, its inability to attract a group of enthousiasts who would be willing to engage with it as their favourite programme, who would be ready to appropriate and cultivate the discourse it offers. In the competitive, multi-choice and fragmented environment of popular media, no producer of public discourse can evade the challenge of creating drama, gaining momentum (Blumler Kavanagh 1999) and activating audience engagement. Engagement has become object of an increasing number of media studies and, paralelly, has been declared the real buzzword of 21th century market research.2 Audience engagement has been attributed a similarly important role by TV network producers, increasingly moving toward the spectacular (Kellner 2003), toward must-see and formula-breaking programming (Jancovich Lyons, Creeber), toward event television (Hesmondhalgh 2002:243) and cult programmes like CSI, Seinfeld, or Lost, giving a new impetus to declining networks in America (Spain 2006). These new directions suggest that in the era of increasing media fragmentation, engagement becomes the key aspect of audience attachment and responsiveness, consequently, a key mediator of media power.

The ultimate role of audience engagement in the recent competitive media environment brings new light to the power and reception of factual media. Conventionally, factual media power has been grasped as the tacit, transparent, repetitive production of mediated reality. However, what recent media transformations have brought to the fore is not the transparent but the visible and the unmissable: highly expressive, engaging and dramatized formats invading everyday factual media. The empirical evidence to be presented in the following essay challenges the conventional wisdom that factual media would effect people by playing upon the illusion of its verisimilitude. Although this illusory veracity of news does exist, it will be argued, it may hamper, instead of enabling, news to be effective. For, in the recent competitive popular media environment, media power is mediated by those popular taste discrimination practices through which people engage with cultural products they find more attractive and valuable than others. News, seen by viewers as a mere window to the world, is simply out of the

game, beyond the above taste judgements. Treating news neither good, nor bad, just a fair collection of events, the viewer rarely engages with it as his or her favourite program. Although the above naive equation of news with quasi-unmediated events implies significant audience loyalty, this loyalty implies at the same time the unability of the audience to judge TV news by their particular aesthetic character. Consequently, TV news have not achieved the status of a particular popular cultural object that can be liked or disliked. In spite of all efforts to turn TV news more attractive, the genre of news is vaining in the competition with new infotainment programmes, which have been much more successful in achiveving the status of popular cultural object.

2. Media attendance in a dramaturgically oversaturated media environment

In Hungary, the political establishment-controlled production of public information was in 1997 entirely subverted by the distribution of broadcasting rights to international media corporations, triggering a pervasive process of media commercialisation.3 As in other countries, media privatization has almost self-evidently raised the question: how has the radical intrusion of commercial actors into the public sphere affected the quality of political discourse? Is media commercialisation empowering or disabling? Is it healthy or not for democracy? These questions have inevitably led to the proliferation of antagonistic, media-pessimistic and media-optimistic (Schulz, Zeh and Quiring 2005) narratives. Neither of these narratives will be applied in the following text. Instead, what will be highlighted is that, in spite of their opposition, these narratives have shared one prominent attribute: they both have interpreted commercialization as the intensification of the dramaturgical power of the media.4

In the followings, the common recognition will be taken as a starting point that market-driven popular media are saturated, in an unprecedented way, by the means and techniques of dramatization. Private television channels have imported from popular entertainment a sophisticated arsenal of dramaturgical intensification: emotional overloading, tension-raising, intense moralization, the topoi of the victim, the hero or the sinner, and other means of performative communication. The cultural codes of dramaturgical condensation (Alexander 2006, Alexander et al 2006) have become the lingua franca of the public sphere dominated by the popular media.5 Moralizing, sensational, playful, negative, emotional, testimonial all these aspects of recent public discourse result from its adaptation to what Altheide and Snow (1979) have defined as media logic: the logic of intense dramatization.6 The fulfillment of media logic signals the emergence of mass media as an autonomous power center (Mancini Swanson 1996:11), which, then, has resulted in the rise of a widened (Meyrowitz 1985:310), media-constructed (Blumler Kavanagh 1999:211) public sphere, a common discursive space where politics and popular culture conjugate (Wernick 1991:148). In this over-dramatized cultural sphere, popular media offers the audience an inescapable flow of highly appealing, powerful, compelling stories of public relevance: forms of witnessing (Peters 2001) and testimonial performances, intensely negative campaign ads, moving everyday parables of life politics, ironic talk-shows or passionate debates of presidential candidates.

In this over-dramatized media environment, political and media actors enact dramaturgical self-performing strategies (Corner Pels 2003) similar to those applied in popular performing arts music, film and theatre.7 This fusion between popular culture and politics consists in the fact that both popular media and politicians are engaged in creating works of popular fiction which portray credible worlds that resonate with peoples experiences (Street 1998:60).8 As an ultimate consequence of the assimilation of public discourse with popular art performances, the cathartic reception practices characterizing performing arts get increasing salience in peoples everyday consumption of public discourse and factual media. Similarly to artistic performances (see Boulton 1960 ref. by Alexander 2006, Frith 1996), popular factual media offer audiences harsh emotional experiences, involve them, and make them form their identities anew.

In the past era of broadcast television (mostly state-controlled), such cathartic practices were not self-evidently present in everyday factual media consumption. They were mainly confined to heavily ceremonialized and establishment-controlled media formats like media events (Dayan Katz 1992). Nowadays, after the emancipation of popular media from political control, the production of heavily dramatized stories has become ubiquitous. The routine overdramatization of public discourse addresses citizens in a role similar to that of the theater audience, thirsting for the cathartic effects the dramatized performance may bring to them. As I will later argue, the intense dramaturgical saturation of media brings

to the fore the deep similarities between receiving factual media and attending dramatized performances. This essay addresses what attending popular media means, and how it relates to the aesthetic/cathartic reception of artistic performances. However, there is no place here to explore in detail what vision of media power the above argument and the metaphor of attendance suggest, this is to be done in a forthcoming study.

The main argument of this article is that the above kinship between media reception and theater attendance does not apply to the consumption of TV news. People may watch them, but do not attend them. This lack of engagement is due to the fact that TV news are not able to keep up with the above trends of intense dramatization. Their dramaturgical deficit does exist, even if, as it has often been pointed out, TV news editors create dramatic and narrative tension by the same means than those applied in fictional TV genres (see Grabe Zhou 2003, Bruner 1998, Newcomb Hirsch 1994). Paradoxically, editors may be able to present particular news stories with a strong narrative and dramaturgical power, however, TV news itself, as a programme, is not perceived at all as particularly appealing or attractive by audiences. In spite of editors intense attempts to dramatize or sensationalize news content, peoples relation to the TV news, even if they watch them every day, has nothing in common with the practices of attending performances. Watching news lacks a wish for common experience, a thirst for catharsis, focused attention, emotional involvement, constant comparisons with other worse or better performances, comparison of an actor with other actors and with his/her own previous performances, an urge for immersion, a wish for secession from the ordinary. In fact, nothing is more ordinary than watching news.

Mainstream theories on factual media have deduced news power from the above ordinariness. This normal, self-evident ordinariness or transparent veracity has been regarded as the key of news power to impose a normative definition of how the world is and should be like. This model has its roots in a literary, reading model of media reception. However, the ordinariness of TV news gains an ultimately different meaning if we grasp media reception by the analogy of attendance. Obviously, people do not attend a performance they would presume to be ordinary, without a particular appeal. Seen from this angle, TV news are expected to pale effectless if people just watch them without attending them, without expecting them to be more attractive than other programmes, without applying to them the same taste judgements with which they discriminate between good and bad popular cultural products (Fiske 1996, Frith 1998). As our data from 2002 demonstrate, this is what happened to TV news in Hungary. Their effects were evaded, because people did not recognize them as appealing, did not relate to them emotionally and did not use them in building their identities.

3. The fading power of news in the era of popular media

The crisis of legitimacy of the news as a social institution in its role of dissemination of information about and interpretation of events is certainly a burning question for the future of democratic politics (Carpignano et al. 1993:96). TV news low dramaturgical power may be a key reason behind its declining importance. With the proliferation of infotainment and factoid genres, TV news has lost its privileged place and became one among the many infotainment programmes competing for the audiences attention. The traditional evening news format is unsuccessful in this competitive context, in spite of its adaptation to commercial pressures. It falls short of more explicit, mobilizing, enchanting factual (infotainment and other) genres. In the USA (Jones 2005) or the Netherlands (van Zoonen Holtz-Bacha 2000), talk shows have recently been reported to take the place of news, with their power to offer greater narrative content that news cant provide (Ellis 1999:57-58). Other accounts have highlighted how new and rising news formats like the FOX channel or talk radio are dethroning the standard evening news programme. An increasing number of researchers have warned that infotainment, and even entertainment, programs do have a public relevance (Delli Carpini Williams 2001, Hermes 1998, 2005, Corner Pels 2003, Dahlgren 1995, MacDonald 2000, Jones 2005). Accordingly, new, popular factual genres may be more influential for audiences civic identities than TV news, in spite of the latters almost totemic role in the research of factual media.

Previous empirical research has failed to demonstrate robust, prevailing and strong effects of commercial TV news either positive or negative (Norris-Sanders 2001, Norris 2000).9 This uncertainty has been reflected in many reviews summarizing the recent transformations of the media (Blumler Kavanagh 1999, Mazzoleni Schulz 1999, McQuail 1992, see Angs comments on McQuails as a

spongue theory [1998]). Of course, empirical media research has always been objected to for revealing only small, equivocal and inconsistent, or heavily context dependent effects (Delli Carpini 2004:421; see also Livingstone 1996). However, this uncertainty seems to hold particularly for news in the context of market-driven, popular media. A particularly telling example is the general disinterest in news of younger generations socialized into the new media context. Far from merging into an escapist consumerism (Graber 2003, Buckingham 2000, Branhurst 1998), young people build their political identities on other resources, and do not care too much for news, which, in Kevin Branhursts words, floats past them, unanchored (1998:216). The above lack of audience response is in sharp contrast with news editors constant efforts to make their programs more interesting, digestible and relevant for people.

Matthew Baum, contemplating the contingent effects of soft news, has wittily formulated media researchers dilemma, asking whether it is the evidence of absence, or the absence of evidence of effects that has emerged from previous research (Baum 2003). This question opens up two different paths. The first one accepts the absence of evidence view, and calls for the collection of more reassuring evidence than previous research (Schulz et al. 2005:78, Zaller 1996). I will pursue the other path, considering the uncertainty of previous research not as a deficiency, an absence, but as a positive finding that commercial TV news discourse does not have robust effects on audiences. Leaning on empirical data taken from Hungary in 2002, I will present reasons why the standard evening news programmes of the two leading broadcast private televisions (RTL Klub and TV2) have not affected audiences dispositions, in spite of their more tabloid style. As we shall see, neither has public service TV news succeeded in having an effect on its audience.

4. News without fans a dramaturgical explanation of news lack of effect in Hungary

The following empirical analysis aims to reveal the underlying causes behind TV news inefficiency in Hungary, 2002. As we shall see, TV news lack of an echo was really unique: out of all the media outlets and programmes examined, only TV news has proved, in Branhursts words, entirely to flow past the audience. By contrast, other factual and infotainment programmes have affected viewers political agenda perceptions and civic dispositions (like interest in and knowledge about politics). Relying on focus group and survey evidence, I will argue that the difference between TV news and other programmes efficiency results from their apparently unequal potential to arouse viewer engagement.

The empirical research was carried out in the early spring of 2002, during the middle period of the parliamentary election campaign. By triangulating content analysis, focus group discussions and survey research, I have tried to gain a comprehensive view on how people consumed factual media and political information four years after the appearance of the commercial TV channels. I have content-analysed the three leading evening news programmes (on m1, TV2 and RTL Klub) and the two leading political newspapers (the left-wing Npszabadsg and the right-wing Magyar Nemzet). I have revealed the organs genre characteristics, their ideological bias and issue agenda. I have also analysed two infotainment programmes on the channel RTL Klub. The first is called Fkusz (Focus), a human-interest daily infotainment magazine. The other, called Heti Hetes10, is a politics-centred weekly comedy panel programme, in which popular journalists and actors comment on politics. Another type of factual programming has also been analysed: information magazines on public and private television, devoted to giving background information on various political, campaign and human-interest issues.

In the focus group and the survey research I have explored how peoples reliance on the above news sources affects their civic involvement, their political affiliations and their knowledge about the most important public issues. 17 focus group discussions were conducted with middle-class Budapest residents between the end of February and the middle of March 2002. The composition of the focus groups was varied by peoples preferences for news organs and political affiliations. The representative survey research was conducted soon after the focus group discussions finished.

Three dispositional factors have been examined by survey methods: agenda perception (the importance attributed to particular public issues), civic involvement (like knowledge level, interest in politics and readiness for participation) and political engagement (several aspects of party affiliation). These ultimate factors of peoples dispositions have been measured with dozens of variables. Table 1 provides a very rough map of the correspondences between these dispositional factors and peoples media consumption habits. In the columns the media variables can be found, representing peoples (self-reported) frequency of consumption of various TV programmes and newspapers. Table 1 consists of 4 rows: the first row reveals to what extent peoples social status influences their media consumption; the

other rows show how the consumption of each programme relates to audiences civic involvement, agenda perception and political engagement. I will present general symbols expressing the average strength of coefficients generated in exhaustive quantitative research, including factor analytical, logistic and linear regression methods.11 The number of bubbles (from 0 to 3) expresses the relative strength of interrelations.

TABLE 1

The striking evidence revealed by Table 1 is that of all the above programmes and organs, only private TV news have proved not to affect audiences at all. Viewers dispositions did not mirror the unquestionably more tabloid negative, scandalous and populist coverage private TV news provided. TV news resonated with viewers dispositions neither in a negative (apathy, privatism, cynicism) nor in a positive sense (interest, distance). They have not proved able to turn peoples attention to crime or the political horse-race, either. Interestingly enough, the public service news programme has affected neither viewers civic involvement nor their agenda perception the two crucial factors for democratic citizenship.12 M1 news has not proved capable of cultivating a more politics and information-oriented attitude in viewers. Apart from TV news, all programmes have affected the civic involvement and the agenda perception of their audience. Considering the productivity of infotainment programmes, the inefficiency of TV news needs explanation. Why have Fkusz, Heti Hetes, newspapers and the other programmes been shown to affect audiences, and why could such correspondences not be revealed at all in the case of TV news?

The above survey findings closely correspond to the ultimate difference revealed by focus group discussions between the reception of TV news and infotainment programmes. Focus group participants were prone to engage in heated discussions about all kinds of programmes except TV news.13 The low efficiency of TV news revealed in survey research has been mirrored in its low capacity to make focus group participants engage in heated debates. The lack of polarization of likers and dislikers has been a key aspect of TV news low productivity. In the case of infotainment programmes, the energy fuelling focus groups discussions lied in a polarisation process through which participants were divided in two opposing groups of fans and haters. Whether fans or haters, people stood up for their cause, allied with others they sympathised with and together re-performed the discourse of their favourite media or political actors. Haters have not proved less loyal than fans; they related trustfully to other media discourses and performers. Of course, lovers and haters, both engaged and emotionally involved, substantially differed from those bystanders who simply did not find the given issue or programme interesting enough to be debated. Bystanders kept their distance and let others produce and contest discourses. Meanwhile, likers passionately elaborated arguments for defending their favourite programme and attacking others. This engagement of likers has been the key point of the productivity of TV programmes. The above process of dramatized polarisation (cf. Dayan 2002b) has proved to be quintessential in the production of knowledge and identities in the focus group discussions. Ultimately, people polarised themselves following the splits of public discourse and media: left vs. right, elitism vs. populism, political vs. apolitical, private TV versus public TV.

Infotainment programmes have proved to be extremely productive and polarizing, and have stimulated heightened debates. Participants easily recognized the narrative and genre characteristics of the two programmes. Why do (not) you like the programme?, proved an easy question, triggering real discursive blasts. In many cases, it was enough to mention the name of Fkusz or of Heti Hetes to activate the work of the identity-formation of fans and haters. From group to group, participants discussing these programmes polarized themselves along a very similar pro and con axis. Likers and dislikers engaged in heightened debates, cited particular experiences and activated common knowledge. The intensity of the debates and the participants willingness to ally with fellow sympathisers clearly suggested that in part they were reproducing previous discussions. In the disputes about the two infotainment programmes likeability, trustworthiness and verisimilitude, sympathisers re-performed and not simply reproduced the programmes dominant values and realities (cf. Dayan and Katz 1992).

In sharp contrast with infotainment programmes, private TV news has not triggered debate and polarisation. Their viewers discussed them with much less emotion and energy than they invested into talking over other programmes. The discussions about private TV news proved to be rather unproductive: sparse, unemotional, and unfocused. Participants discussed general themes like news-watching habits, shuttling back and forth between various issues rather than focusing on the news itself. Most people

simply did not have any idea about whether or not they liked the news programme. Consequently, they were not able to engage in discussion about the news, either. They came up with some banal comments (e.g. news presents what happened today), in sharp contrast with their emotionally overloaded discussions about infotainment programmes. In focus group discussions, at least four factors of dramaturgical condensation have emerged along which intense and productive debates have differed from unproductive discussions (for a similar attempt to measure the intensity of viewer engagement, see Russell et al. 2004). Discussions about private TV news performed rather poorly in each of these dimensions. The four factors identification, polarisation, focus and recall all proved essential in the dramatized production of discourse in focus groups. These factors characterize the intensity of engagement with popular cultural performances in general, and are equally fundamental, as well, in factual media reception, if we grasp this latter in terms of attendance, as it has been foreshadowed in the introduction. I can only draw a rough picture of these dimensions here.

Identification, as theorized by Liebes and Katz, equally implies the of and the with meanings of the word: it represents peoples engagement with a discourse they have recognised as attractive (e.g. Liebes Katz). Identification is self-evidently interwoven with a double process of polarisation: if a programme is recognised as appealing, there is a good chance that, on the one hand, it will be contrasted with other, less preferred or even despised, programmes, and that, on the other, it will fuel a debate between likers and haters. These processes have been absent in most of the discussions about private TV news programmes. Focus group participants relative perplexity when asked about how they liked TV news has manifested itself in two ways. Either they simply evaded the question, or they chose the opposite tactic and associated a wide range of positive attributes with the news programme they regularly watched, without expressing a clear preference for any of them.

Instead of illustrating the above perplexity of participants, let me here quote a non-typical opinion about private TV news, which may be even more illuminating. According to accounts sympathetic to popular media, ordinary people feel enabled by its personal and populist tone, and its human interest focus. Accordingly, womens attachment to human interest programmes would be a resistance to the dominant value hierarchy that appreciates news and hard information and is tailored to male social roles (Morley 1992). We have found only a very few cases underlying this interpretation: some private TV news likers have asserted they found these programmes empowering. These people have identified themselves with the programme and contrasted private news with old style, elitist and grey news discourse. Consider the opinion of Sra, TV2 viewer and politically undecided.

1.excerpt. A non-typical attitude to private TV news

Sra TV2 news approaches things from more diverse standpoints, everybody can get a word in, it gives access to many more groups, even my son watches it, because there are interesting things in it it is not so austere as the news was before, when people did not understand what was going on politics and stuff I dont care about it is more colourful, informal, I feel more that it talks to me

Private TV news discourse in this case seems to be especially productive: Sra recognised TV2 news as talking to her, talking in her name, and engaged herself in intense identifying and polarising utterances in which she addressed some of TV2 news dominant meanings its less political, more informal and human interest focus and contrasted it with the news from before. However, the engagement of Sra, as our focus group discussions clearly demonstrated, can by no means be generalised to the majority of private TV news viewers. Most viewers proved to be unaffected by private TV news genre characteristics and reported to watch them simply to get informed about what happened today. The concept of news for most participants meant the recent events of the outside world, and not a particularly structured programme. Unlike Sra, most viewers did not have elaborated opinions about the news framing strategies, narrative specifics or thematic focus. Explicit self-identification with private TV news proved to be as rare as clear-cut preferences for one private TV news programme over another.

The above absence of identification and polarisation in most of the discussions about private TV news has been reflected in the low level of focus and recall. These factors represent the extent to which a performer monopolises audiences attention: focused discussions do not deflect even for a single moment from the issue at stake, while the high level of recall signifies that participants rely heavily on the performers discourse as a resource of examples, facts, stories and arguments. The following excerpt clearly exemplifies how people, when asked about private TV news, were often strikingly unwilling to talk about the programme itself.

2. excerpt

Moderator Most of you have mentioned RTL Klub news. What do you think about this programme?Kroly The programme just comes, with all the other programmes which are popular and people just

stay there. I find these programmes more up to par()

Attila I agree with Kroly that the editing of the programme I mean the order of the programmes one after the other, I mean Among Friends14

Anita FkuszIrn FkuszAttila Yes, my permanent daily agenda is news, and then Who is who...Rzsi Who Wants to be a Millionaire?Anita Who Wants to beAttila Once I had an argument with someone that he doesnt watch it because he doesnt like Vg.15 I

told him I dont watch it because of Vg, but that so many questions ariseIrn He hosts the programme wellva Vg is very goodModerator va, please, what do youva I like Vg very muchModerator I mean, what do you think about RTL news?va Oh yeah, the news, well, thats the most interesting oneAnita I think it is more objective than TV2: what I noticed is that maybe it presents the news more

objectively(silence)

Moderator OK, so could you tell me, how do you feel about m1 news?(silence)

Anita I dont watch it Fkusz starts just thenva Thats the lesser reason, for m1 is very biasedAttila Fkusz speaks in more length about the same things that can be seen and listened to on the news

Fkusz expounds, maybe and they come one after the other, not far away from each other like morning and evening, but with only a half hour difference.

Moderator We will return to Fkusz later, but Pter, you said that you watched m1 newsPter On the whole, I find RTL a bit meant for effect; concretely, Fkusz has been mentioned

(.)

As the above, extremely unfocused discussion and other similar ones have highlighted, private TV news programmes are only rarely chosen deliberately by people looking for some particularly appealing news content. Most viewers watch the news as part of the flow of the surrounding programmes. By contrast, when the same people talked over the infotainment programmes, they were not deflected even for a single moment from the issue. Their discussions about infotainment programmes were full of polarised identifications and disidentifications, sympathisers re-performed the programmes discourse, their imagination was caught by the stories, images and arguments offered by the performer, while dislikers expressed their doubts, and all these activities arose rather spontaneously.

The focus group which found that people are uncertain about the genre characteristics of news programmes has been spectacularly verified by survey research in which we examined how people perceive TV news genres. Survey respondents were asked to characterise the three news programmes with adjectives expressing possible genre attributes. The ten attributes were the following: reliable, understandable, dynamic, cares about the problems of the everyday person, sensational, hosts are sympathetic, doesnt want to persuade, interesting, information-rich, superficial. In each case, survey respondents were asked to name the TV news programme they felt corresponded most particularly to the given attribute.16 Out of the data received, I have composed thirty dummy variables, each of which has expressed whether or not a respondent found that a TV news programme corresponded to one genre attribute (e.g.: TV2 news is/is not interesting). These thirty variables have been factor analysed and, thus, the general trends of peoples news genre perception have been revealed. The results of the factor analysis are presented below in Table 2.

What we might have expected, starting from earlier tabloidization research, is that private TV news viewers will mainly appreciate the comprehensibility, human character and curiosity of their news programmes. We might also have supposed that public service news watchers will mostly highlight the richness and reliability of information as important, and view private news with disdain for its

sensationalism and superficiality. In short, we might have expected that the serious vs. tabloid dimension, so much highlighted in previous research, would be reflected in viewers preferences for news. If the majority of people had perceived this difference, an outstanding factor should have emerged. In the case of this hypothetical factor, positive soft news attributes of TV2 and RTL Klub news (interesting, human, etc.) should have been opposed to two groups of variables: to positive hard news attributes of m1 news (information rich, reliable, unbiased) on the one hand, and to belittled soft news characteristics (sensationalism, superficiality) attributed to the two private channels on the other. What we see, instead, is that viewers unselectively connected all the possible positive attributes to the news programme they regularly watched (the strength of the coefficients has been almost equal for each factor). Three factors have emerged, each explaining an equal part of the total variance (around 13%), and each expressing a very general and diffuse preference for one of the three TV news programmes.

TABLE 2

The three factors indicate that peoples preferences for the three TV news programmes are rather characterless. Respondents, by affirming each genre attribute at the same time, have tried to hide the fact that they lack clear genre preferences this behaviour has often been present in focus group discussions, also. The focus group findings I have presented corroborate that the above three news preference factors have not emerged from survey respondents meaningful engagements, but from their rationalising tactic simply to translate their news watching practices into the language of attitudes and preferences.

TABLE 3

As Table 3 clearly demonstrates, each news preference factor expresses the regular consumption of one news programme and the infrequent consumption of the two other programmes. Those expressing a preference for one news programme have been shown to watch neither of the two others. As the moderate negative correlations (-0,08, -0,16) suggest, this is the case even with news on the two private TV stations: although their discourse was rather similar, regularly watching one of them has not implied an affirmative disposition toward the other.

6. Illusory transparency and verisimilitude in the new media environment

Most of focus group and survey participants could not recognize TV news genre characteristics. They simply accepted TV news programmes as they were, as a fair and transparent collection of the events of the day. Paradoxically, this nave stance emerged only in relation to TV news, the only programmes not affecting audience dispositions at all! People regarded TV news as a window on the world taken for granted, and, at the same time, evaded their effects. Meanwhile, other programmes did affect their viewers dispositions, even if their veracity and reliability were much less self-evident for viewers, as the heated debates between likers and haters clearly demonstrated. On the whole, the efficiency of media was not identical to its uncontested veracity (and, on the other hand, neither did the recognition of some programmes political bias guarantee that their effects would be resisted; Csig 2007b). These findings challenge the conventional wisdom that factual media would effect people by playing upon the illusion of its verisimilitude.

Dominant conceptualizations of factual media power have grasped it as a silent influence on the ultimate process of perception and meaning making, by shaping the categories and frameworks through which audience members perceive socio-political reality (Blumler Gurevich 1982:262; c.f. McLeod Kosicki McLeod 2002:217, McQuail 1992, Morley 1992, Philo 1990, Lewis 1991, Kitzinger 1993, Gerbner et al. 1984, Iyengar-Kinder 1987, McCombs Gilbert 1994, Pan and Kosicki 1993:70). This consensual model (Katz 1980:133) has defined factual media power as the production of naturalized representations (cf. Allan 1999:87, Hall 1997). The illusory transparency of media discourse, expressed by metaphors like mirror or window, has been regarded as quintessential in the power of media to influence perception and identity. The central role of media transparency has been expressed in the frequent use of synonymous concepts like veracity, verisimilitude, referential illusion or veridical effect (for reviews, see Dahlgren 1995, Hartley 1982, Grisprud 2002, Allan 1999). In the followings, this model will be referred to as the reality effect model.

The above model of strong and subordinating media effects has been heavily attacked in the last two decades. Alternative conceptualizations have highlighted that the new media environment opens a place for far more individualized media use (McQuail 1992, Delli Carpini Williams 2001, Blumler-Kavanagh 1999). Other efforts have further refined the classical U&G model (e.g. Perse 1994). Poststructuralist and ethnographical media research has announced the death of dominant meanings, claiming that they get necessarily hijacked by audiences local cultural context and practices (Ang Hermes 1995 Alasuutari 1999, Abercrombie Longhurst 1996). Several understandings of audiences as active have been complicit with the reality effect model: questioning it empirically, but relying on it as a self-evident theoretical model to be confuted. On the whole, audience activity has remained opposed to large-scale media effects. Following this trade-off, many researchers have kept supposing, as Sonia Livingstone has critically pointed out, that the ways in which viewers selectively interpret what they see, depending on their own experiences and cultural background undermine media effects (Livingstone 1996:318, for similar criticisms, see Katz 1996:19).

Neither of the above approaches can grasp the empirical findings presented above. For, although people did evade TV news power, they did not eschew other programmes address which affected and mobilized large and socially heterogeneous audience segments. Moreover, the above evasion of TV news effects did not at all imply an active or critical stance. It would be highly simplistic to explain TV news inefficiency purely by its limited capacity to bring reality effects on active and competent audiences. This interpretation would be at odds with peoples apparent naivety regarding TV news. People were navely and uncritically loyal to TV news which, in spite of this loyalty, were unable to profit from it. Their audiences did not cultivate programme-specific dispositions or values. These findings contradict the mainstream reality effect model. They demonstrate that large-scale media effects cannot be restricted to the uncritical acceptance of the frames, representations or agendas presented by the media.

7. Attending media towards a dramaturgical model of media power

Why were TV news unable to affect people, those who accepted them as real and truthful? This seeming ambivalence may be resolved by disconnecting nave loyalty to media and exposure to its effects. For passive and nave acceptance implies not only a potential openness to influence, but also a lack of care and inspiration to get activated and mobilized by media. This alternative explanation brings the problem of dramaturgy and engagement to the fore. In the following, TV news lack of effect will be traced back to its weak dramaturgical power to attract a group of engaged viewers which would recognize them as attractive and meaningful performances worth to attend.

The above findings presented lead towards a dramaturgical approach that considers the cultural products of media not as texts to be read, but as performances to be attended. While the reality effect model grasped media power as affecting the passive general audience, dramaturgical approaches, inspired by the metaphor of theatre, focus on those active and responsive segments of people who are willing to attend the performance and get taken over by its power. The theatre analogy may fundamentally challenge mainstream understandings of media power as subordinating the passive receiver. For theatre audiences do not simply receive a play, but attend the performance hall, they do not simply accept the world of the play, but invest mental energies into stepping into it, deliberately and selectively plunging into the aesthetic experience the performance offers (Marinis Dwyer 1987). Along these distinctions, the very concept of media power can be rethought in the framework of social drama, catharsis, and ceremonial performance (Dayan-Katz 1992, Alexander 2006, Frith 1996, 1998, Turner 1969, Schechner 2003). There is no place here for systematically deploying a dramaturgical approach to factual media power, its relation to the reality effect model and its embeddedness in the competitive environment of popular media. Only those dramaturgical insights will be presented here which may help illuminating why TV news uncontested veracity led to its relative powerlessness compared to other programmes.

Approaches starting from theories of dramaturgical action and ceremonial anthropology have focused on the role of media in, less the maintenance, than the transcendence of the ordinary: the creation of a sacred, liminal, space, where a subjunctive orientation to idealized values is enacted, and ordinary reality reconsidered (Cottle 2006, Dayan Katz 1992, Alexander 2006). Dramaturgical approaches, from their earliest forms like Burkes (1957) or Goffmans (1990 [1959]) dramaturgical theory, have been relying on the analogy of theater in exploring how modern, mediatized forms of

sacrality are produced and used. Along the theater analogy, four points may be highlighted as relevant for our exploration of veracity, news and popular factual media.

First, theater theories mostly agree in the fact that theater performance requires the audience to actively and critically invest mental efforts into establishing belief in the reality of the play (Schechner 2003, Boulton 1960). Accordingly, the play brings cathartic effects on the audience only through the latters intense and close cooperation with the performer. Cathartic reception of performances, if achieved, amalgamates subordination and agency, misrecognition and recognition, mannered rhetorical force and perceived authenticity (Frith 1996:109, 115; Pels 2003). As argued by Roger Silverstone, popular media may trigger similar engagements, which fuse agency and effects, and are not decomposable into presence or absence, activity or passivity (Silverstone 1994:170).17 Along this argument, the effects of mediatized public discourse may be rethought as mediated by the emotionally intense engagement and self-activation of audiences, who behave more like attending a programme than merely reading or receiving it.

Secondly, the above argument projects an imaginary figure of the effected receiver, which is hard to reconcile with the reality effect model. While this latter has envisioned a couch potato passively swallowing heavy doses of the media flow18, a dramaturgical approach would imagine affected audiences as passionately discussing media at home or the workplace, in the belief that what they are debating is really important. In these discussions, audiences dramatize their attachments to cultural products and perform it to their fellow audience members: draw conclusions, exaggerate, use irony, find the moral of the story, blame, show care, present typical storylines and characters, and so on. Dayan and Katzs analysis of practices of festive viewing has been an outstanding attempt to understand these local, diasporic (1992:145) re-enactments which make a media event not a spectacle, but a concert of performances (1992:140). Simon Frith theorizes music consumption as saturated by similar performative practices: in his view, music listening is not a mere act of reception. People make meaning of music and enjoy it by re-enacting its valued characteristics: as listeners, we perform the music for ourselves, Frith argues (1998:204). In such moments of everyday dramatized re-enactment, people surrender (Katz 1996:16): they offer their trust to media performers, and display this attachment to their peers.

The third point is that the above approach transcends the conventional opposition of passive/subordinate receivers and more active ones, and the conventional understanding of these latter as bringing to media what is their own (either as individuals or as parts of local cultures), instead of accepting what is brought to them by media. What is emphasized, instead, is the contrast between the active, engaged and effected believer and the reluctant and passive bystander who evades media effects and any sort of self-involvement. The polarization of lovers and haters, a dramaturgical mechanism fuelling all of our focus group discussions, is a divide inside the group of believers, whose overall engagements are either in line with, or in opposition with the narratives and meanings offered by a particular programme.

The aesthetic judgements by which likers distinguish themselves from haters and bystanders do not stand alone: as Simon Frith argues, they are amalgamated with ethical and morality judgements (1998:67-74), and also, it has to be added, with an awareness that they are not solitary acts, but represent shared experiences with like-minded others enacting similar discriminations. These discriminatory practices are aimed to overcome fragmentation and achieve an imaginary fusion with performers and fellow audience members (Alexander 2006). Consequently, moments when aesthetic and cathartic effects emerge do not relate to the uninvolved, passive and repetitive swallowing of the ordinary media flow. On the contrary, people affected by dramatized media performances try to overcome fragmentation and distance, stop and suspend media flow. The establishment of faith through engagement is achieved by various practices of suspension, including the imaginary deactivation of distance between performer and receiver, the abandonment of ordinariness, and the suspension of disbelief. The catharsis and faith triggered by performing arts have been long ago associated with the deliberate permissiveness of audiences willing to reach poetic faith, as Coleridge has first declared two centuries ago. Suspending disbelief is an attitude traditionally attributed to audiences of artistic performances especially imitative art , to listeners of stories in general, to players enjoying games and, finally, to fans who can belong to each above category. Seen from a dramaturgical angle, the willing suspension of disbelief (for Goffmans similar arguments see Burns [1992:304], see also Galgut 2002) is an inevitable factor in the symbolic traffic between media and audiences.

Engagement has been understood above as taste discrimination and an intentional, imaginary deactivation of distance between performer and audience. This implies an element of recognition: a

programme, to trigger engagement, has to be recognized as more attractive and likeable than others. This recognition enables people to activate their emotional and cognitive energies, invest themselves into the discourse (c.f. Grossberg 1992), let themselves be led by its dominant meanings and re-perform the discourse to their fellows in their local life contexts.

Transparent texts do not activate the above recognition, and, according to the dramaturgical model applied here, audiences cannot re-perform a discourse the presence of which they ignore.19 Consequently, transparent texts will pale without effect, will be objects of viewers selective perception, their meanings torn up by the receivers alternative, more explicit, self-identifications. From a dramaturgical point of view, no self-identification with a discourse can happen without the identification of the discourse as attractive and productive. Accordingly, the effectiveness of a discourse is inseparable from peoples willingness to get affected, from their intentions about the given media performance: why to watch/read it, what to look for in it, how to judge it, whom to watch/read it with, whom to talk to about it, and so on. TV news in Hungary have proved to be inefficient because people never asked themselves such questions, they simply accepted TV news as they were.

The representational practices of private and public TV news in Hungary were not peculiar enough to turn a group of viewers into enthusiasts who would have passionately cultivated their discourse. News, perceived as transparent windows to the world, has not become the object of those everyday discussions in which people elaborate their emotional relation to and expectations about programmes and actors of media (whats good and whats bad in RTL Klub News?, why do I watch it?, do I like it?, is it better than TV2 News?, does it speak to and for people like me?). Of course, people were interested in particular issues presented by the news, but they were entirely indifferent to TV news itself as a particular programme with specific genre characteristics. This lies behind focus group participants perplexed, mannered and incidental reactions when asked about news. People did not invest mental energies in understanding what a news programme is, if it is good or bad, reliable or unreliable, and why. This unmotivated, elusive glance (cf. Ellis 1982) of viewers hindered TV news in becoming productive and efficient. In contrast to infotainment programmes, TV news did not trigger dense, emotionally overcharged and productive discussions through which likers could have cultivated and further elaborated the programmes discourse. TV news low productivity was due to the fact that their reception completely missed the passion of audiences attending, and discriminating between, dramatized performances.

7. Conclusion: popular taste discrimination and factual medias dramatic productivity

As the above presented inefficiency of TV news demonstrates, regular and repetitive exposure to media may not be the most important factor mediating factual media power in the new media environment. Although TV news hit relatively high audience scores, which suggests they are popular, they have proved to be at the same time particularly unpopular in terms of their inability to heighten audience emotions. This underlies Simon Friths warning that the intensity of engagement with and the frequency of exposure to media may be entirely independent from each other, not to be conflated by the common umbrella term of popularity (c.f. Frith 1998:48). This turns attention from repetitive exposure to cathartic engagement. In popular media, just like in theater, the rise of cathartic effects is not a matter of how many times the receiver sees the same play. In the competitive environment of popular media, only programmes recognized as likeable can attract an engaged group of viewers who would be willing to cultivate their discourse (the implications to classical Agenda Setting theory are presented in Csig 2007a). In this context, factual media texts, to be productive, have to be explicit, harsh and attractive: easily recognisable and discernable by audiences.

Conventional theorising of factual media power has focused on how a media programme (re)presented the world, and bracketed off why people actually have chosen to watch that particular program over others. The reality effect model has focused on what distinctions media set between social classes, between the important and the unimportant, between spheres of us and them, and whether these distinctions can be imposed on receivers. By contrast, the dramaturgical approach I am arguing for is interested in what distinctions people set between media programs, and how do they discriminate what is good, appealing, speaking to them and for them from what they find bad and indifferent, devoid of dramatic power. The more competitive the media environment, the more these popular discriminatory practices pervade the consumption of all cultural products, from factual media to

popular music (Frith 2003, Fiske 1996). The more factual media and public discourse is amalgamating with popular taste cultures (Corner Pels 2003, Street 1998, van Zoonen 2004) and popular discriminatory practices, the more media power is getting mediated by peoples engagements with the attractive, and not simply by their exposure the unnoticed.

In a competitive media context, it is not the ordinary media flow, but its suspension, which embodies large-scale media effects. In the era of extreme media abundance, media flow is flowing in too many directions for the audience could be simply taken by it. It is water cooler programs, cult shows, small and large media events and pseudo-events which have a chance to turn peoples media exposure into engaged media attendance. The above heightening of emotions is a key aspect of what the dramaturgical approach mostly focuses on: the cathartic productivity of factual media discourses the intensification of discussions about them, the focusing of attention, the polarization of likers and dislikers, the creation of new knowlede and identities, the will of audiences to activate themselves and engage (c.f. Fiske 1996:34).20

In spite of all attempts to heighten news content, the standard evening news format is simply not productive enough in the above terms of dramaturgy. Several factors impede TV news in becoming object of engaged taste discriminations. Weak viewer engagement with news is inscribed into the very raw level of the TV channels programme structure. News are the only programmes the place of which is never accentuated by promotional means. Never advertised themselves, TV news are becoming the place where infotainment programmes are promoted by tie-ins. For example, RTL Klub news hosts orient people every evening to the days Fkusz edition, for a more detailed coverage of some human interest issues. These advertisements are devoted to increase peoples receptivity, motivation and attention, and thus may serve as efficient amplifiers of dramaturgical media effects. By contrast, news programmes are never taken to the focus of audiences identities and taste judgements: their presence in popular television contradicts the logic of audience-maximizing cultural production.

The above ambiguous status of TV news is mirrored in the ambivalence and openness of their content. As previous research has made it clear, TV news editing is constantly confined by the necessity of balancing out contradictory requirements (Hallin 1986, Graber 1994:504). Some of these latters are prescribed by explicite regulations or implicite expectations enacted by the state. Others are dictated by market pressures: originally protected from Nielsen ratings pressures, news programmes are increasingly subbmitted to the same criteria as entertainment programming (Moog Sluyter-Beltrao 2001). As a consequence, TV news have to be detached without losing their attractivity. They have to be appealing, but not biased politically, so as not to lose other-minded audiences. They have to feed audiences populist attitudes with scandals without making them completely bored of politics. They have to present complex issues in an easily digestible language, and so on. The necessary adoption of contradictory genre elements hampers tabloidizing TV news in reaching textual closure and performing a well-recognizable discourse.

The above urge of conventional TV news to maintain an internal pluralism and relative balance (Kunczik 2001) is becoming outdated in the market-like, promotional environment of popular media which favours the external pluralism of competing, partisan, expressive, harsh media forms. The extensive attacks in the name of new journalism against the objectivity standard clearly react to the rise of a plural media environment (Dahlgren, see also Cohen Eliot 1997: 59-63 and Iggers 1998:66,107 ref. by Bajomi-Lzr 2003) where consensual norms of journalism do not prevail any longer. The old understanding of news as integrating the general public into a dominant political culture (Katz 1996b) surrenders the place to a more segmentary vision of factual media effects. The last decades media success stories like FOX, talk shows, South Park, Ali G, Michael Moore, Stephen Colbert or Rush Limbaugh emblematize the increasingly partisan, expressive face of new infotainment media, intensely fictionalizing public discourse. This process certainly challenges democratic politics and public discourse, of which TV news has been ceased to be the main depository.

Failing to reach dramaturgical closure and trigger engagement, the conventional evening news format is loosing of its power to channel public discourse. It may be adapted to new developments, but it does not project the future of popular media. Given the low dramatic productivity and weak effects of TV news, a critical defense of democracy from the dumbing down of news may not be the most appropriate reaction to the recent transformations of media. The real threats and promises of popular media lie elsewhere and not in news. In lack of this recognition, it is to be feared that an overly defensive advocacy for classic forms of factual media discourse will pale, like TV news itself.

TABLES:

Table 1 The interrelations between media consumption and social status, civic involvement, agenda perception and political affiliation.

Table 2A factor analysis of 30 variables expressing preferences for news programmes.

factor 1 (m1 newspreference)

factor 2 (rtl klub news preference)

factor 3 (tv2 news preference)

m1 news is (has) the most

Reliable 0.60Understandable 0.74Dynamic 0.75Caring about everyday people 0.62SensationalLikeable hosts 0.76Unbiased 0.59Interesting 0.80Information rich 0.79Superficial 0.26 0.21

Rtl Klub news is (has) the most

Reliable 0.64Understandable 0.72Dynamic 0.68Caring about everyday people 0.61SensationalLikeable hosts 0.67Unbiased 0.55Interesting 0.72Information-rich 0.74Superficial 0.21

How often the respondent watched/readpublic info progs.

private infoprogs.

RTL Klub (private) news

TV2 (private)news

m1 (public)news

Heti Hetestalk show

Fkuszhuman interest prog.

Npszabadsg (left-w.paper)

Magyar Nemzet(right-wpaper)

Social status relation to media consumption habits

Civic involvements relation to media consumption habits

Agenda perceptions relation to media consumption habits

Political affiliations relation to media consumption habits

TV2 news is (has) the most

Reliable 0.60Understandable 0.65Dynamic 0.70Caring about everyday people 0.64SensationalLikeable hosts 0.68Unbiased 0.53Interesting 0.69Information-rich 0.20 0.73Superficial

% of the total variance explained 14% 13% 12%ULS extraction method, Varimax rotation; only coefficients above 0.2 are presented

Table 3. The correlation of news-watching habits and the personal scores on the three news preference factors.

factor 1 (m1 newspreference)

factor 2 (rtl klub news preference)

factor 3 (tv2 news preference)

The frequency of watching

m1 news 0.38 -0.26 -0.16rtl klub news -0.23 0.34 -0.08tv2 news -0.19 -0.16 0.28

Pearson correlation coefficients, all significant at 0.01 level.

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1 The title of my study, downbreaking news, refers to a typical aspect of the vulnerabilities of TV news to adapt to the new media environment. The example of breaking news represents that it is not enough to multiply ad infinitum the dramatic elements which intensify news content and trigger audience attention. Originally, breaking news referred to a real suspension of the programme flow and presumed the audiences intense attention to the live coverage of outstanding events. Reacting to the hyper-competitivity of the recent media environment, editors have attempted to capitalize on the attention grabbing potential of the term. However, the permanent useage of breaking news has inflated the terms original meaning, which now expresses hardly more than the headlines of the day. This projects a change in the reception of the term, as well, as expressed by a media expert: I am so sick of 'breaking news,' I have almost quit watching TV. It has been so overused that no one pays attention anymore (Greeley 2006). 2 See www.consumerengagement.com, or Nielsens highlights, presenting their own engagement research at http://www.nielsenmedia.com. For other companies measuring engagement, see (Clegg 2006)3 Two commercial TV channels, RTL Klub (owned by Bertelsmann) and TV2 (SBS Broadcasting), established an oligopolistic position only a few months after their appearance. By now, the two private channels control some 60-70% of the total viewing time in Hungary. Meanwhile, the three public service TV channels (m1, m2, Duna TV) lost most of their audiences, due to their uniquely low performance in providing high quality programming, and their constant subordination to the government of the day. The broadcast m1, the satellite m2 and Duna TV, with an aggregate audience share oscillating between 10 and 20%, have been endangered in their very existence (Sksd Bajomi-Lzr 2003). The number of people using traditionally respected sources of information like public service news programmes, televised debates of intellectuals or serious political newspapers has considerably declined. The two private televisions have imported most of the genres and programmes which saturate popular television over the world. New formats of factual television call it infotainment, hybridised, post-documentary, negative or human interest have almost all appeared in the private media in Hungary.4 Critical accounts have contested the negative, cynical, sensationalist, populist, overly moralizing, emotional tone of popular news, and the consecutive scandalization, spectacularization, fictionalization, personalization and informalization of public discourse. These processes have been thought to seclude receivers from access to the structural features of society and politics (Patterson 1996:97; Cappella-Jamieson 1996; Blumler 1997; Dahlgren 1995:60; Franklin 1997:8; Sparks 1992:41, 2000:28-29). Positive approaches to popular news have not been less sensitive to the medias intense dramaturgical saturation. Sympathetic accounts have welcomed the playful, ironic tone and carnivalesque nature of popular media, its human interest emphasis, its power to re-engage the alienated and to reintegrate the excluded into the realm of politics. Popular media has been claimed to empower people by legitimating lay testimonies and serving as an emotional resource in coping with everyday role conflicts and morality dilemmas (Becker 1992, Glynn 2000, Fiske 1987, Jones 2005, Brookes 2000, Street 1998, Langer 1998, van Zoonen 2003b). Less normative approaches have equally grasped media commercialization in terms of dramaturgical intensification, by accounting for how emotional and testimonial TV genres maintain cultural citizenship (Hermes 1998, 2005, MacDonald 2000), or by exploring trends of celebrification and the consecutive style revolution taking place in politics (Corner Pels 2003:8).5 The dramaturgical saturation of factual and infotainment media has been taking place in an era when conventional relations between politics and society are transforming, as suggested by reports about the pale of traditional class and ideological cleavages (Carter et al. 1995, Bennett 2003), the radical drop of strong party identifiers in the last 30 years (Crewe Thompson), and the widely documented increase of distrust in politics. In a profoundly distrustful and ideologically uncertain context, the more subtle technologies of dramatization, emotional intensification and aesthetic enhancement are increasingly shaping the discursive battle for public authority and authenticity (c.f. Corner Pels 2003).6 This adaptive process has been defined as mediatization, which, importantly, is taking place not only in politics (Mazzoleni Schulz 1999): factual media itself is getting mediatized (that means dramatized and intensified), given that it is not exempted any longer from ratings pressures.7 Certainly, this process is not without dangers for democratic politics. It would be highly incautious, however, to take traditional criticisms related to aestheticized politics, and announce the victory of regressive escapism and obsessive irrationalism in politics. As I have argued elsewhere, the conjunction of politics and popular culture results not in manipulation or passivity but in a new aesthetic productivity, new discursive mechanisms creating political knowledge and identifications. When, for example, political actors celebrate themselves by promotional techniques borrowed from popular culture, the audience may get polarized to likers and dislikers, instead of simply being seduced by the harmonious aura created by the politician.8 Other scholars have gone even further, pointing out that the production and reception of public discourses are increasingly determined by the logic of fandom and celebrity (Marshall 1997), projecting a fan democracy (van Zoonen 2004). Uncautious criticism related to the irrational and obsessive nature of fandom should be avoided in this case, either. For, recent research on fandom has freed this notion from the cellar of obsessive teenager escapism and rethought it as a particularly distilled form of those productive forms of cultural consumption that characterize the reception of cultural products and performances (Fiske 1992, Grossberg 1992b, Frith 1996, Hills 2002).9 Pippa Norris work could be cited here as an exceptionally powerful illustration of this argument. Norris has been brave and generous enough to publish all kinds of empirical findings, which have been either ambivalent in themselves or in

contradiction to her own earlier findings.10 Its original is called Sieben Tage, Sieben Kpfe in Germany.11 Detailed research documentation can be requested from the author.12 The only feature of the three news programmes that did affect audiences was the pro-government bias of the public service TV news. m1 news exerted a political mobilizing effect, what is not too surprising given the almost propagandistic address of the programme. Much more striking is that those who watched m1 news and sympathized with the government have proved to be aware of the programmes bias! This highly ambivalent relation of viewers to m1 news evokes the similarly ambiguous stance of audiences of dramatized performances. Thus, as I have argued elsewhere, a dramaturgical approach is inevitable in understanding the mobilizing effects of m1 news.13 Unfortunately, we do not have much focus group data about public service news.14 Among Friends is a daily soap opera at RTL Klub.15 The host of Who Wants to be a Millionaire in Hungary.16 Respondents could name as many as they wanted of the three news programmes, m1 news, TV2 news and RTL Klub news.17 However, performers cannot self-evidently count on audiences energy investments. People will step into the world of the performance only if gratified by high emotional and aesthetic experiences. The same recognition stands behind the early claim of U&G studies that media influence is mediated by the motivations and emotional states of the audience. It is worth to evoke here Elihu Katzs long-forgotten warning that even the most potent of the mass media content cannot ordinarily influence an individual who has no use for it (Katz 1959, quoted in Rubin 2002). This thesis of Katz has little in common with the active audience and weak effects stance that his works have been attributed by many. (A typical criticism is that of Kubey, claiming that Katz is not interested in what television does to people, only in what people do to television [Kubey 1996:194]). Katzs argument highlights less the lack of media influence than its necessary mediatedness by audience gratifications. This point has been taken further by Alan Rubin who has reconceptualized cultivation effects as active engagement with, and not passive subordination to, media content (Rubin 2002).18 It is important to point, again, that this model itself was heavily debated inside the mainstreams of media research. Its importance results less from its widespread acceptance, than from its perception as the ultimate model of media effects which has to be empirically verified or refuted.19 This idea is absolutley antithetical to Judith Butlers theory on performativity (Butler 1997a). This warns how much the notion of performance and performativity has been overused in the last decades. 20 To use Fiskes distinction, it might be argued that in the popular media environment, factual media effects work less by tacitly structuring reception, as imagined by the mainstream understanding, than by triggering productivity.