Social Media Influence On Presidential Elections

Since the commencement of the two United States political party associations, Democratic and Republican parties, a variation of medias have managed to influence and seemingly dictate an outcome for these two groups. Different media outlets tend to influence primarily presidential elections. The vast interference and involvement that media has had with politics has been noted as far back as John F. Kennedy’s first televised presidential debate in 1960. This sparked the beginning of a new and “youthful” (Gidlow) technique of getting involved with political elections. Although, controversy and negative feedback has been on the rise, which involves the morality of what the media publishes or shows about the election candidates. There is debate

In the United States those who are within the ages of 18-25, approximately, two-thirds of them receive political information from social media (Riker, Marina). This becomes self evident on how large social media influence is on the younger citizens. However, this is based off of the most recent elections and not as prominent in elections before John F. Kennedy’s campaign. During the 1970s and 1980s with Presidents Carter, Nixon, Reagan and George H. W. Bush (Team, EPISD U.S. Government). These presidents managed to use media to their own advantage by bashing, or rather putting a negative connotation to their opponents campaign to help their case in the election. This is the method that can be seen as immoral which causes controversy within the people. Another contributor to the negative effects of media also shown by the EPISD Team was using the TV networks during Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign. During his election time he showed a campaign ad on TV called “The Daisy Girl” that included a little girl picking petals of a flower while the sound of a countdown to a nuclear explosion occurred in the background. This candidate used scare tactics in order to strike fear in voters and grab the attention of those who did not pay any attention to him. Campaign ads like this are used to influence voters in a more negative way than

People who affiliate themselves with media that reports democratic conservative influenced information are completely separate from the liberal republicans. There is no perfect balance for the accuracy or the bias information that is reported on different networks. It is either going to be extremely bias or completely false and misleading information given by a source. And with more and more information appearing on a daily basis it is up to the media to decide whether it will report an accurate report for it's own benefit and for the benefit of the viewers knowledge or do the complete opposite. It is evident that there needs to be a definite solution to this issue in regards to bias news media involvement in politics.The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) needs to enforce a policy on media outlets that could potentially decrease bias in the media, a great amount of benefits would rise from it. Also a policy that enforces the accuracy on given candidate information during elections to benefit voters would create more trustworthy media networks. With media features put into work such as equality, balance, unbiased, and accuracy, then “the quality of citizenship and the health of citizenship” (Claes de Vreese) would improve and American political knowledge would be