Entertainment and News Crossovers
Infotainers are entertainers in infotainment media, such as news anchors or "news personalities" who cross the line between journalism (quasi-journalism) and entertainment. Notable examples in the U.S. media are Barbara Walters, Katie Couric, Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck, Anderson Cooper, Maury Povich, Deborah Norville, and Geraldo Rivera among others.
Barbara Walters, though not the first to cross the line between news and personality stories, is for many the quintessential news-media icon. Her career dates back to the 50s, and her current prominence at ABC is largely due to celebrity interviews, with a long running co-anchorship on 20/20 with Hugh Downs and, later, John Stossel until 2004, and her overlapping morning infotainment show The View.
When Geraldo Rivera became the host of his own news-oriented talk show on CNBC, others within the NBC organization voiced their protest, including Tom Brokaw who was reported to have threatened to quit. Rivera had a notorious history as a "sleaze reporter" and daytime talk show host, where he and one or two others were representative of "Tabloid talk shows"; television seen to have little social value or redeeming intelligence, but still popular with viewers.
The term "infotainer" is credited to Joel Bauer in the mid 1990s. The wayback machine website reports http://infotainer.com goes all the way back to June 17, 1997. However, Bauer is reported to use the term long before that.
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Famous quotes containing the words entertainment and and/or news:
“Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome superabundance of that sort of time which is not money.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.”
—Bible: New Testament, Mark 16:15.
Jesus.