Abstract
This article is a brief review and critique of the main scholarly approaches to thinking about popular forms of news in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, particularly in regards to broadcast television. Rather than advocating the merits of either popular or `hard' news, it discusses the possibility of finding (or revisiting) a critical approach to popular news and current affairs1 journalism that charts a suitable middle ground: one that can accommodate the emergence of popular informational programs (e.g. The Awful Truth, The Daily Show) and one that moves away from the sometimes too simplistic binary discourses that have tended to become characteristic of recent debates over `tabloidization'.
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