Pułapki infotainmentu
The traps of Infotainment

Summary/Abstract: From the producer-director’s point of view, violence is an economical means of expression, an easy way to tell a dramatic story. The universal contemporary media practice leads to a carnivalization of violence: but while the historic carnival employed images of upside-down world, strands of folk humor, contemporary entertainment relies on cruelty to serve the economics of media production, the cheapest expression. Television worldwide invariably shows the battlefield of wars, revolutions, insurrections, demonstrations and street fights, intermingled with images of genocide, famine, drought and other disasters. The econtextualization of tragic TV news, the Manichean approach to conflict description, the fatalism and Armageddon surfacing in the interpretation of events, all result in the viewer’s being paradoxically less informed and farther from reality. The media do not serve truth, but rather cater to the viewer’s expectations. Information becomes infotainment, and for his own expectations of necrophilia infotainment, the viewer pays with psychological overload. Crime, war, organized genocide and neighborly hostility have always existed. But now the viewer, sitting on his couch, has become a hostage of nations threatened with extinction and local communities terrorized by an unknown rapist, he is now a hostage of all the endangered, who have made themselves known to him.

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