Media 's Influence On Politics

“Since media are part of the political class and talk mostly to the political class, the myth of popular polarization took root and grew.” (Fiorina, Abrams, Pope, 2005, p. 167). Recently media has played a huge role in the country’s politic; they share information, report events, and frame opinions.

The media is important for us the people to inform us about our government. In this paper I will show the relationship between the media and Congress. There are many forms of traditional media newspapers and magazines and TV news programs. Until recently people got most of their information and news from traditional sources. I would agree with scholars who argue that the media plays a major role as an agenda setter by focusing the public’s attention on a few issues. Public opinion is shaped in large part by people’s exposure to the media. There are two main areas of media agenda setting the first is reporting the news the second is telling us how to view the news.

In the past twenty years, the United States media has transformed from a broadcasting to a narrowcasting media. Each method has its unique differences, with one being the amount of bias from each source. Narrowcasting specifically, can greatly affect the media’s ability to influence public opinion.

U.S. adults spend, on average, over 10 hours everyday consuming media. Media is everywhere around us, whether it is the internet, television, newspapers, or even the ads that you see outside everyday. Americans are surrounded by media and it is practically impossible to avoid media for the average American. For the most part, we look towards media to make sense of the senseless, and to show us what the difference is between the lies and the truth. Many Americans feel as if the media would never skew from the complete and utter truth. But, that is a false assumption, the media, like everyone else has an opinion on topics and many times they use their great voices to make the consumers develop the same opinion.

Chun-Fang Chiang and Brian Knight discuss the significance that media bias has on voters in America. They conducted a study in which subjects select a candidate to vote for after reading a biased newspaper article. After the research is conducted, they determine that media is influential in determining who people will vote for, but there are different degrees of influence. For example, people are more willing to be influenced when their source is more credible and when the voters tend to be more moderate.

Political scientist, journalists, and politicians alike often discuss the role of the news media’s place in affecting campaigns, and voter perceptions. Claims of media bias in political news coverage have risen over the past two decades. Scholarly research has explored concerns that broadcast and print media shape voting decisions in democratic processes.

Since the United States of America were first established, the news media has had a large and important role in influencing the people. Even during the American Revolution, the press helped to shape the public opinion in favor of the patriotic agenda through newspapers and pamphlets. In the Early Republic, Broadsides became popular with the people and, in the Jacksonian Era, a more voters inclusive press, the “penny press”, and the Associated Press, using a new technology known as the telegraph, rose in popularity. But, more events along the way saw to the growth of the news media as we know it today.

In America we value the freedom of the press. The press is the one place where most Americans go to get educated on issues facing their community, state, and most of all nation. Everyone knows that the media plays a major role in Americans' lives; however their role of gatekeeper is not completely understood. The press decides which issues to report and how to report them. In order to improve the nation and world, the media should present their unbiased findings to allow people to make up their own minds. However, this is not the case. The media often shows its bias. Their widespread exposure enables them to communicate their ideas to the public, regardless of

For the average American there is no escape from mass media. It can be found within our news papers, movies, television and internet, which account for most of our news and entertainment source. In Michael Parenti's book, Make Believe Media, the Politics of Entertainment, Parenti attests that this mass media clouds our society's perception of reality by propagating prefabricated images that create and validate a superficial ideological world. Unfortunately, people are denied the opportunity to obtain and interpret information, which impacts our society, by media conglomerates that wish to keep their industry profitable and on the rise. Effectively, the American public's information and entertainment sources are controlled by some ten

The media can link people to the government by spreading opinions, ideas, or facts about political subjects that could affect policy or behavior for example, “heavy users of social media, relying on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to connect them with more than just friends and family. Eighty-eight percent … said they use Facebook to find news. This reliance on social media has fueled debates about how social media and personalized web searches influence political polarization. At the same time, social media also provides opportunities for people to actively engage in politics,”(Kelsh 1). This example proves the reliance that society and the American people have on the media, including the opinions and bias found in many online

Lambert, Scott. Left Turn: How Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. Gateway Journalism 2011. Web. 19 Sept. 2015.

Bias in the media influences the public greatly. Not only does biased media change the public's perception of certain politics and events, it can also change a person's political affiliation. As previously stated, Fox News is a primarily conservative news source. Fox News has close ties to the Republican Party and has more of a conservative outlook on certain events. Due to this close relationship, a large portion of the articles and coverage echoes these beliefs. An article produced by the Oxford Journals, studied this bias and the effect it can have; they even dubbed it “The Fox News Effect” (Kaplan). This “Fox News Effect” was found to have a profound impact on political affiliation and individuals who watched primarily Fox News reports. They found that “The introduction of Fox News [to] the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000… gained [Republicans] 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News”(Kaplan). As this study shows, bias really does have an effect on the public, and can even influence individuals to change their political affiliation. Another finding in this report was that Fox News managed to convince 28 percent of their viewers to vote Republican (Kaplan). This data is increasingly important, especially in proving that bias

Throughout recent American history, the media has played an important role in shaping the attitudes and view points of the nation. Because of the media, people are now more informed and better connected than at any other time in human history.

In this day and age, it’s assumed that our information is unfiltered and uncut. This should hardly be a surprise in the internet era, with popularized search engines that provide unbiased information in a matter of seconds. To that end, society has numbed itself to biases found in media and tends to follow what is proclaimed to be true and ethical. This is particularly true in regard to print and televisual media. Due to society’s failure to question these media forms, it frequently becomes coaxed into converting its ideas to those made by the media. In other words, media outlets consistently have political leanings that manipulate our understanding of information, particularly in regards to the public’s political beliefs.

An example of how media has influenced politics would be the 1960 Nixon verse Kennedy. During this time, the TV was the newest media outlet. Nixon seems to have spent most of his time preparing his debates on the radio with Kennedy, but Kennedy took more pride in his looks for the debates that were going to be broadcasted on the television. Nixon did not think that the people would pay too much attention to the way that he looked, he assumed that it would be based off what he said. This is related to how media has influenced politics because without the development of the TV Nixon probably would have been the winner of their debates and maybe even the whole election. This article supports this topic because Obama used his social media account