What is wrong with entertainment in politics?
The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism’s (PCIJ) report last Dec. 22 on the dominance of news, entertainment, and sports personalities that could fill up the Philippine Senate after the May 2025 elections invites all of us to reconsider our views about our entertainment culture in the country.
More than just a presentation and making sense of the facts, the PCIJ article can be read as a warning on the future of our political life. If we will not be careful, soon, we will put the fate of our nation in the hands of celebrities and entertainers.
Let me be very clear at the outset that there is nothing wrong with media celebrities entering the world of public service. Our Constitution allows everyone to enter electoral politics for as long as they are qualified and fit to serve. What then is the real problem of entertainment in politics?
There is nothing inherently wrong with being entertained. Life, as we know it, must always be a combination of work and play, and humanity has invented a lot of ways for leisure to escape from the monotony of life, and to keep us going and working to survive and thrive.
However, when we regard entertainment as unproblematic, or as something so naïve and detached from our everyday struggles as individuals and communities, we are giving it the power to snatch our mental ability to question everything. Marxist scholars call it the process of reification where actual social relationships are substituted with something created by those in the dominant position of power; in this case, entertainment is the mask that those in power put on our faces so we can pretend that we are not tired, poor, or oppressed.
There are several ways to explain our problems with entertainment and I offer only one, from where I stand as a media practitioner: The development of an entertainment culture in the media cannot be separated from the objective of creating a consumerist culture that primarily aims to transform the audience from citizens to consumers.
This transformation requires that we veer away from thinking too seriously about social issues or life in general because entertainment culture is anathema to critical thinking. It allows for a certain degree of criticism, but only to be dismissed or joked about in the end. This is not to say that the broadcast media is the only avenue for the dissemination of entertainment culture. But in our country where television is still the dominant form of mass media that has extended its reach in social media, we cannot underestimate the power of television in our body politic despite the rise of the new media.
Entertainment culture does not strip away critical thinking; it hinders its development. We may not look so far in giving obvious examples. Entertainment programs in our mass media still dominate our primetime slots day and night, and those programs with serious content are placed in the wee hours or during weekends. Few people have the time and energy to watch or listen to those programs. And we have learned to accept the reason. Entertainment shows have more audiences than those other programs with serious content. When you have more audience, sponsors will pour in, which means more profit for the shows and the company. In a country where more than 90 percent of its media are commercially owned, this condition is not that hard to understand.
The media ratings game is also so compelling to ignore. No one in her right mind will believe that even the most well-intentioned political debates during campaigns before the election are free from sponsors and commercial interests. We have learned to accept the reason. Media companies pay a huge amount of money for their precious talents, equipment, food, and everything else, so these expenses must be compensated. It is no wonder then that aside from media companies deciding what topics for the debate must be included and what should be set aside, they also reserve the right to decide how long will the issues be discussed and how will they be arranged because time costs millions of pesos to be wasted.
In the process of transforming us from citizens to consumers, the expected consequence is to make ourselves detached from talking so much about politics but immersing ourselves in some other things where we will be entertained.
I don’t fully subscribe to the idea that entertainment shows proliferate because this is a response to the need of ordinary people who are already tired from work so they long for something where they can relax or unwind.
The proliferation of so many entertainment shows in our media landscape does not only give us a short leisure time; it is also dangerous because it continues to give us a false sense of hope that everything is fine even if it’s not.
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Dr. Ricky R. Rosales is an associate professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, a senior lecturer at the University of the Philippines Diliman Department of Sociology, and news anchor for Teleradyo Serbisyo and Radyo 630.
