Why Can’t We Believe in That? Partisan Political Entertainment in the Mexican YouTube Sphere

Abstract

The YouTube video platform has provided fertile ground for creators outside the journalistic field to produce programs that combine elements of entertainment with information on public affairs. Behind the emergence of these practices lie important trends enabling alternative public discourses and altering the cultural production, but also an environment mainly characterized by the low trust in mainstream news organizations and high ideological polarization that seem to give shape to political entertainment contents—and especially their overt political partisanship. Based on observations of independent political entertainment YouTube channels in Mexico, this study delves into their apparently contradictory intersections with professional journalism and the constraints imposed on their practice by platform affordances.