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5 The News You Gotta Love It Jonathan Gray This chapter began while I was conducting interviews with Simpsons viewers about parody and satire (see Gray 2006). While discussing The Simpons ’ news parody, one of my interviewees talked at length about her love for politics and the news. She watched, by her estimate, three to four hours each day of Canadian parliamentary access television, and was a voracious news consumer. Yet quite impassionedly, and with more than just Canadian humility, she insisted that a great deal of this was entertainment for her: Don’t get me wrong: I do know every MP in Canada, and when it’s an election , I’ll tell you their opponents too. I can tell you what they believe, how well they debate, and how ugly or handsome they are. But I don’t just watch “to be a good citizen” and do my “Canadian duty” [laughs]. Really, I, it’s entertainment. I love it. I really love it. It’s my soap opera. There are, are villains , and good guys, you can cheer some on, and get involved. If I did all this just to vote, that would be excessive. I watch because it amuses me. At the time, her comments were off-topic, so I rushed her along. But I remained fascinated by what was clearly a news fan, and by someone so impressively involved in Canadian polity, yet who talked of it in very unHabermasian ways. This chapter marks a return to the site of news fandom , as I explore the love and passion for a genre that is given plenty of academic consideration, but rarely if ever as a fan object. “Serious” news and fandom are typically described with wholly different theoretical tool 75 kits, but here I examine their points of contact to suggest a more profound marriage among news, politics, and fandom than many would deem either existent or appropriate. To perform such a marriage between the news and an idea of fandom may seem either unholy or odd to some readers. Certainly, there is much established work to suggest that they are fundamentally different. Thomas Patterson defines what in America is frequently called “hard news” (or what others might call “real” or “political” news) as “coverage of breaking events involving top leaders, major issues, or significant disruptions in the routines of daily life, such as earthquakes or airline disasters. Information about these events is presumably important to citizens’ ability to understand and respond to the world of public affairs” (2000: 3). Amid the many concerns regarding contemporary infotainment and dumbed-down, “soft” journalism (e.g., Kerbel 2000; Patterson 2000; Postman & Powers 1992), and amid endless accusations of news bias, a very clear notion of news appears. News should, so goes the rationale, offer objective facts and reporting on current events, and other information relevant to the practice of citizenship, hailing its viewers as intelligent, cerebral individuals in search of rational debate and thought. Ingrained in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and in its protection of the press is the reflection that the free flow of information and opinions is vital to democratic citizenship and participation in civic society, and hence that the news acts as the very doorway to the public sphere, or agora. Indeed, Habermas ’s notion of the public sphere (1989)1 is perhaps the most academically invoked ideal for news and media practice. Particularly important to this ideal is Habermas’s call for rational discourse: borrowing from a long line of post-Enlightenment thinking (see Marcus 2002), Habermas believed in the emotional as irrational, and thus in the need to separate heart from mind in this public sphere. Especially in the wake of Lippman (1922) and others’ fear of propaganda and emotional appeals polluting the news and, through it, democratic society, entertainment and the emotional have been seen as incommensurate with hard news, and as poisonous to its realm. In contrast to the news as a supposedly somber, rational, informational genre would seem to lie the very concept of fans. By definition, fans have an avid like or love for something. Hills (2002) plumbs psychological depths to offer the elaborated idea that fans are those who have made of their beloved text a transitional object, in Winnicott’s terms (1974), imbuing it with special personal and/or communal symbolic value, and Hills, 76 b e y o n d p o p c...

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