The role of the media is often seen as informing, educating and entertaining but over the years, media scholarship has tended to concentrate on the information and education functions with little literature on the entertainment function of the media. This works sets out to highlight the media’s entertainment function, to question the neat division in media functions, to canvas the view that what informs and educates also entertains and to re-examine “the entertainment function of the media as shapers and moulders of social consciousness. The work examine the importance of entertainment in the communication chain both as content and technique and, appropriately, serves it in lucid and engaging prose.   

Contents: Dedication/Acknowledgement/Introduction/Entertainment! What Entertainment?/Popular Literature as Entertainment/Entertainment and the Magic Box: Why Nigeria’s window to the world is falling off/Film, Entertainment and Social Consciousness/ Laughing to stop crying: Camouflage as Communication Weapon/The Art of Editorial Cartooning: Make them think, laugh and cry/Sports Reporting as Market for Entertainment and Big Business/Television Production and the price of airing Entertainment/Entertainment Sponsorship: Scrutinising Television’s Big Deal/Thisweek and its Entertainment Strength/Finding Direction by Indirections: Thisday and the search for Entertainment/Curricula and Pedagogic issues in Media and Entertainment Studies/A Different Mogul/The One to whom Nothing is impossible/The One who took the Media by Storm/The Precocious Phenom/The Duke of Media Engagement/Notes on Contributors/Index