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Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge (Critical Media Studies: Institutions, Politics, and Culture)

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Entertaining The Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge by Liesbet Van Zoonen (Critical Media Studies: Rowman & Littlefield) (Paperback) One day, while researching for this book, I came across an excited text from an American student who had to watch The West Wing, an American television series about life and politics at the White House, for her political science class. Did I envy her! I remember reading All the President's Men and watching the movie in the Netherlands in the mid-seventies, when I was in my teens. I found it electrifying; what an amaz¬ing arrogance of the Nixon administration, what a daring investigation by the Washington Post journalists, what a right and proper outcome of the democratic process. How exhilarating politics could be! I don't re-ally remember whether the book and the movie made me go to univer¬sity to study political science, but I do recall my surprise and frustration in my first year that politics could be made so tiresome. We did not get movies at my Dutch university, but there were lots of readings, endless theorizing, enigmatic statistical logics, and discussion-always more discussion. On only a few occasions did a teacher manage to convey some of the passion and vitality that motivates people to become involved in politics or to study political science. More often I found my-self struggling with the abstract concepts of "the state," "ideology," and "the public sphere." I found out only later that my bewilderment as an eighteen-year-old (Where is this public sphere exactly?) was a running gag among scholars working with the concept. Had they told me then, I may not have ended up with such a love-hate relationship with politics and political science; much of which also had to do, as I understood again much later, with being one of the few women to study this pecu¬liar discipline.
After my first disappointing year, I turned away and focused on re-search methodology and media studies. These proved to be much more concrete and fun; apparently I was not cut out for the intense and solemn business of politics and political science. Some two decades later I have managed to shrug off my inevitable sense of failure and turn the issue around. I started to wonder if there was a deficiency in politics and polit¬ical science itself. Perhaps my difficulties with the discipline were not the result of my frivolity but a consequence of how politics and the belonging discipline framed itself. It seemed likely that I was not the only one who was terribly bored; after all, political interest and student numbers seemed to be declining, at least in the late nineties in the Netherlands.
Obviously, age, experience, and position enabled me to ask the ques¬tions that I thought were trivial when I was eighteen. This book is the re¬sult. It is meant as an agenda to think about entertaining politics, instead of simply discarding it as irrelevant and dangerous to citizenship and the democratic project. It is meant as a starting point for debate, and it is meant to stimulate and entertain students and all others reading it.
Excerpt: Can politics be combined with entertainment? Can political involvement and participation be fun? Can citizenship be pleasurable? These and similar questions have forced themselves upon us again and again in the past years: they were, for instance, raised by Arnold Schwarzeneg¬ger's election as governor of California. They were implicit in the meet¬ings between U2 lead singer Bono and world leaders, which concerned Third World debts. They were behind the outcry that greeted the pro¬posal, by American cable network FX, to run a televised political popu¬larity contest in the vein of American Idol, with the purpose of selecting presidential candidates. They were inherent in the acclaim for the award-winning television series The West Wing, a fictional portrayal of day-to-day political processes in the White House. They were heightened in the dispute about the portrayal of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in the 2003 tel¬evision series The Reagans, which made CBS decide not to air the show on network television.