Infoentretenimiento periodístico en la cobertura de las elecciones. El caso de los debates presidenciales

Abstract

Journalistic coverage of elections is increasingly about conflict, scandals, horse race coverage and gaffes, a phenomenon called infotainment, which is detrimental to the political content of elections, this is to say, the candidates' proposals and leader profiles. To assess the scope of these tendencies in the Mexican press, we focused our research on the coverage of presidential debates in the 2012 campaign, events with profuse political content, and undertook a content analysis of five national newspapers to measure frames related to infotainment (N=209 units). We found that the coverage was focused on the conflict between actors and performance assessment of the event, with little reference to the candidates' political positions and profiles. Such treatment is detrimental to the potential of civic formation of the debates, a significant feature of democracy.