Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge.

• Author: Wiese, Danielle R.
• Position: Book Review

Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge. By Liesbet van Zoonen. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005; pp. vii + 181. $69.00 cloth; $26.95 paper.

In Entertaining the Citizen, Liesbet van Zoonen establishes herself as one of the first authors to offer a book-length project on the so-called 'popularization' of modern institutional politics that does more than merely trace the connections between Hollywood and the Beltway. This book not only brings a welcome international perspective to a U.S.-dominated discussion, but also theorizes the relationship between popular culture and governing as a form of political praxis. The result is an intriguing proposal to remedy the crisis of citizen participation in liberal democracies. Entertainment, she argues, can show us how to get motivated, informed and excited about politics.

Chapter 1 begins with the historical frame that separates entertainment from politics. Recounting the views of Neil Postman and Pierre Bourdieu, for example, van Zoonen outlines the age-old belief that politics is the realm of reason, while popular culture ignites reason's antithesis-passion. For van Zoonen, the distinction is academic. She insists that we need to break down the boundaries between these two spheres because "politics has to be connected to the everyday culture of its citizens; otherwise it becomes an alien sphere, occupied by strangers no one cares and bothers about" (p. 3). The modernist impulse to dismiss entertainment ignores what many media critics have speculated about for decades: like it or not, popular culture drives citizen interpretations of the political landscape.

Television culture is the "dominant means for interpreting social and political life" (p. 21). In Chapter 2, for example, van Zoonen reviews her early work on the ties between television soap operas and the prevailing talk about politics. News stories employ the narrative structure and terminology of soap operas to describe political events and scandals such as Clinton's Lewinsky affair and Tony Blair's trouble with Parliament. As a result, "the soap simultaneously provides the metaphor with which to criticize the political behavior of opponents ... and the symbols with which to create affirmative ties between candidates, constituencies, and possible voters" (p. 21).

The author makes a similar claim in Chapter 7, echoing the work of rhetorical scholars who contend that stories are the "heart of everyday...