Political Entertainment and the Press' Construction of Sarah Feylin

Abstract

In the fall of 2008, the press became fascinated with comedian Tina Fey's Saturday Night Live impersonations of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. This phenomenon marks an important application of the postmodern journalistic practices of strategy-framing, hyper-personalization, and media meta-coverage. In a hybrid media environment in which the distinction between information and entertainment is obsolete, these journalistic practices can be applied to people and texts that fall outside the traditional political context. The complex dynamics among Palin, Fey, and the press provide an opportunity to move away from a linear model of “effects” toward treatment of the communication cycle itself as the object of inquiry. In this analysis, news coverage of Palin and Fey serves as the textual embodiment of Carey's (1989) notion of the “arena of dramatic forces and action” (p. 21) that is the news. Textual analysis is employed to explore how the coverage of Palin's campaign featured both Fey and Palin in a strategically framed, hyper-personalized, meta-coverage narrative.