Review of Popularization & Personalization. A Historical and Cultural Analysis of 50 Years of Dutch Political Television Journalism by R. Van Santen. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Almanakker, Oosterhout, 2012, 196 pages

Abstract

In the last couple of decades various scholars have signaled the occurrence and development of important processes in political communication. If some have broadly coined these transformationsas "Americanization" (Negrine & Papathanassopoulos, 1996; Scammel, 1998), "professionalization" (Blumler & Kavanaugh, 1999; Strömbäck, 2008; Stamper & Brants, 2011), "tabloidization" (Barnett, 1998; Connell, 1998; Klein, 1996) or "infotainment", (Street, 2000; 2001), others have associated them with terms such as "video malaise (Robinson, 1976) or "spectatorship democracy" (De Beus, 2011). According to these views, political journalism nowadays has stepped into a new era, in which the coverage of political events andtelevision programming itself are heading towards an entertainment logic. Rosa Van Santen's work addresses all of these issues and represents a very valuable contribution to assesing these hypotheses. The book represents her PhD thesis and is structured into seven chapters, one of which illustrates a literature review on the concepts of popularization and personalization; and five represent separate empirical studies addressing them.