Connotation and Media Portrayal: How the Way News is Packaged Has Changed
Introduction
In the present-day American political climate, television news broadcasts play a significant role in the way information is spread and consumed. With no such thing as having a truly unbiased source, the way news is communicated and represented can have a large impact on how viewers respond to it and the public’s collective understanding of events. Television and journalism are for-profit industries that have underlying motives beyond informing the public, like raising viewership, generating more revenue from advertisements, and competing with other networks. For this reason, the model of how a network presents its stories changes in the best interest of the network’s livelihood, which may or may not also be the best means of communicating information to the viewer.
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Most of the text analyzed in this project centers around American presidents, and the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections. Both elections were occasions where there was a change of power from a Democratic president and Congress to a Republican majority. The outcome of both elections was hotly contested after the winner lost the popular vote but won the electoral college, the only two occasions this has happened in American history since 1888. With both periods containing an extremely similar event being at the forefront of American consciousness, and thus having a strong presence in the media, these two time periods are good candidates for drawing conjectures about the nature of television reporting as a