Like I said, I’m not trying to tell you how to spend your time (although I will note that looking up and reading all or part of an occasional research article here and there, if it’s not too dense with specialist jargon, is not really as time-consuming as you seem to think).
I’m just pointing out that limiting your information sources to the spoken-conversation audio podcast format, with no easy access to any cites or direct quotations or contextual information, disadvantages you when it comes to being able to carry on a fact-based, critically analytical discussion of occasional soundbites you remember hearing on a podcast episode. As your own frequent posts requesting other posters to find out facts or analyze arguments for you make abundantly clear.
“Infotainment” is a term for broadcast media intended both to entertain and inform. If Harris wanted his podcasts to consist of straight-up news reportage or rigorous scholarly analysis of research complete with detailed citations, AFAIK there’s absolutely nothing stopping him from creating such podcasts, at least up to the limits of his own knowledge and abilities. It appears that he prefers the more informal Sunday-sermon and interview-chat formats precisely because they will be more accessible and entertaining for his listeners. What’s wrong with calling that “infotainment”?
Some of Burns’ work certainly has been called so, and I don’t see in what way that assessment is “derisory” or even “condescending”:
I presume you’re using “TNC” to refer to the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates? If so, then my response is that IME the term “infotainment” is typically applied to broadcast media, whereas Coates’ articles would typically be called “opinion pieces” or “popular journalism” or “culture punditry” or something like that. If you want to make a case for including such written publications in the category “infotainment”, I’d be willing to discuss it: I certainly won’t be taking to the fainting couch over it.
That is typically categorized as “broadcast news journalism”. Again, if you have a case to make for lumping it in with “infotainment”, let’s hear it.
It would depend on the technical level and intended audience of the lecture. Again, AFAIK it is more typical to apply the term “infotainment” to broadcast media rather than to in-person talks, but I would be happy to characterize a non-technical, primarily image-based, popular lecture on linguistics or physics for a general audience with no specialized knowledge of the subject as “infotainment”. More esoteric presentations on academic subjects aimed at more specialized audiences usually have too high an information-to-entertainment ratio to fall into that category.
That’s nice, but the trouble is it’s not very evident from your attempts at debate. And given how frequently claims that you’ve cited from podcasts (or at least, from your memories of the podcasts) have been rebutted by research sources cited by other posters, you might want to reconsider your assumptions about how much you’re actually learning from them. Absorbing a bunch of insecurely-supported opinions and questionable factual assertions well padded with self-congratulatory smugness about their alleged intellectual boldness in “frank discussion of taboo topics” is not necessarily the same thing as learning.
In short, SlackerInc, if you want your podcast-memory-derived snippets of argument to be taken seriously as debate material, then you need to stop falling back on feeble responses like the following:
You are pretty much refusing to research anything in these discussions that you want to engage in about these informal and lightly-documented claims remembered, with varying degrees of accuracy, from podcast conversations. And you’re weakly trying to excuse that refusal on the plea that it’s not possible for anybody to research everything. Do you understand how this inevitably makes you come across as a critical-thinking lightweight relying on other posters to do your disputational due diligence for you?
It would be a different matter if you posted something along the lines of “Hey, I thought this podcast discussion (link) was interesting and here’s my best recollection of the gist of the arguments that were made. Anybody have any opinions or corroborations or rebuttals they’d like to offer?” Nobody would mind doing a little research for your benefit if you made it clear that you understood that you can’t have an informed opinion without basing it on research, and that what you know about the topic so far doesn’t necessarily qualify you to have an informed opinion.
But instead, you’re typically marching back into this thread in full Harris-jugend battle array with an opinion already espoused, issuing rhetorical challenges with strong subtexts of “Dear Leader made some fantastic points in this week’s sermon, let’s see you pathetic politically correct hive-minders try to refute this!” You are ignorantly taking a side on the issue du jour before you’ve put in any work to learn anything about it, other than passively listening to a highly partisan podcast because that’s what fits best into your busy day. And then you get miffed when we call you lazy and gullible.
TL;DR: either put in the effort to research a debate topic or get off your goddamn soapbox about it.