On The Social Causes Of The Entertainmentization Of American Media

The entertainmentization trend , in the real sense, of Media initially appeared in western capitalist countries in 1980's. It's symptom is that the ratio of entertaining programs on News papers, TV, Radio grew increasingly big, and serious news programs got cold reception and repression, while, for catering the audience and satisfying audiences'entertainment needs, news programs were decorated with entertainment clothes.The entertainmentization trend of Media has its causes. Taking news report, the symbol of media industry, as an example, American media analyst Ben Bagdikian coined a word– infotainment--- to describe the trend that news report was merging with entertainment, or put it in other words, news as a kind of light entertainment to entail blockbuster. In the new historical context, the making and selecting of news is gradually dominated by Marketization, and this situation also contributed to the trend of media entertainmentization. For the time of being, this trend is on a big fanfare in china's media industry. Chinese communication scholars have not yet had a consensus on the definition of the trend, and the studies on the social causes of this trend are not satisfactorily deep enough, therefore, this issue is in need of further study. This essay tries to analyze the social causes of the entertainmentization of American media in four levels, namely to analyze philosophically, politically, economically and culturally, with a hope that this shallow study may probably make some valuable contribution for the research on the development of china's media industry.