Mass Media Influence On American Politics

American politics have been quite a spectacle because of the amount of influence the mass media has on it paired with the way in which American politics are run. Ideally, mass media is supposed to make it easier for people to participate in political decisions, understand how the government works, and hold government officials accountable. But in this day and age, the media is often used to manipulate and obscure the true form of political issues. Nowadays, the media is a giant in the world of politics, often being the one and only source for information for most Americans. Albeit the information being just that, information, most of the time, these stories are often too skewed and too far fetched to be believable but since it came from such

In recent years, social media outlets have been responsible for the widespread mobilization of young voters everywhere in the country. It is also much easier for campaigners harness the availability of these social medias by directly contacting with voters online. The reason as to why I feel the mass media is dangerous for a democracy is because it fills the minds of voters with nonsense that only grays their judgement instead of feeding the public actual information that would go on to supplement well-thought out decisions. The lightning speed of which news is produced puts pressure on political figures to make faster decisions. With the populace becoming more accustomed to increased speed of information and action, they would be putting pressure on the government to act quickly. The problem is that acting quickly can be acting rashly. We do not want media pressure to push our governments into doing terrible things because they weren’t given proper amounts of time to think them over. A country as powerful and influential as the U.S. cannot afford to run off of guesswork and hype regarding the most important issues facing our

News networking giants such as CNN and the FOX News Network are two of the colossal forces that rule the world of televised news, both with their own sets of political biases; CNN leaning more toward the democratic left while FOX prefers to mingle with the republican right. Although both major parties do have large presences in the industry, the number of republicans employed in the press is remarkably small according to claims made by Politico. This means that since republican journalism is met with a larger opposition in terms of democratic leaning journalist being more dominant in the field, this does not mean however, that they are weaker than the latter. “There’s more television being watched now (2015) than ever before. For the most part, voters tend to be 35 and older. These are the people who statistically vote the most. So that’s why you still see TV as your biggest megaphone.”-Evan Tracey, senior vice president at National Media Inc.; this statistic shown goes to speak that those who choose to tune into programs on the FOX and CNN networks are fed information through what Tracey would call, the largest megaphone (TV). Be it a fading form media behind the internet, television plays a strong role in acquiring voters through newscasts and programs. Older age groups choose to rely on the television compared to the internet meaning the information received from the TV screen would be much