Pop Culture, Politics, and the News: Entertainment Journalism in the Polarized Media Landscape [Paperback]

InPop Culture, Politics, and the News, Joel Penney explores how pop culture news has taken on an important role in contemporary political discourse. Through coverage of topics like Hollywood diversity, celebrity controversy, and cancel culture backlash, entertainment journalism has emerged as a key source of political information and commentary, providing audiences with an accessible lens into some of the most hot-button issues of our time. Yet due to the clickbait economics of the polarized digital news business, the quality of entertainment journalism is often compromised, and consequently, people view pop culture coverage as soft news with little substance or public value. As a cutting-edge, data-rich analysis of the blurring boundaries between entertainment, politics, social media activism, and partisan journalism,Pop Culture, Politics, and the Newsmakes a major contribution to public scholarship on the shifting digital information landscape.InPop Culture, Politics, and the News, Joel Penney explores how pop culture news has taken on an important role in contemporary political discourse. Through coverage of topics like Hollywood diversity, celebrity controversy, and cancel culture backlash, entertainment journalism has emerged as a key source of political information and commentary, providing audiences with an accessible lens into some of the most hot-button issues of our time. Yet due to the clickbait economics of the polarized digital news business, the quality of entertainment journalism is often compromised, and consequently, people view pop culture coverage as soft news with little substance or public value.Very little is known about how this journalism is produced and consumed as a component of the digital news ecosystem. Moreover, we lack a measured sense of its potential impact on the political interests and knowledge of its audiences, the politics of the entertainment industry it covers, and the shape of public deblS+