Role of Media in American Politics - Essay Example

“Balanced coverage [is what] plagues American journalism and ...leads to utterly spineless reporting with no edge. The idea seems to be that journalists are allowed to go out to report, but when it comes time to write, we are expected to turn our brains off and repeat the spin from both sides..."Balanced" is not fair, it's just an easy way of avoiding real reporting...and shirking our responsibility to inform readers” (Ken Silverstein, 2008).

The American political scene has seen a major development in the last 50- 100 years, which is the rise and the development of what is known as the ‘Political Spectacle’ (Edelman, 1988), or ‘The Rhetorical Presidency’ (Tulis, 1987). For the common layman, it is better known as Media Politics and is completely different from traditional party politics. Media politics is the new form of communication that uses the mass media to disseminate political news, and ranges from presidential speeches, various TV ads, press meetings, or even the normal routine daily news, which creates a form of ‘virtual reality’ for its viewers. Though the results, as have been observed in the various elections, are quite far from being virtual, and are indeed real and turning out to be critical too, for the political parties. In the context of conducting political campaigns, the magnitude and scale of the US elections in recent years is something that would have been unimaginable even 60 years back. These transformations in the political field can be to a large extent laid at the door of the media and press coverage of the political policies. John Zaller summarily defines this slowly evolving new process in the arena of US media and politics as, “the attempt to govern based on words and images that diffuse through the mass media” (2009, 389).

There is no denying the fact that in this twenty-first century modern world, the news media does indeed play a pivotal role in the functioning of political regimes, and the shaping of a nation’s democracy. In a modern democratic country, the right to information forms a vital criterion for its citizens to assess the functioning of the political party in power, and to receive this information they rely on different various news distributing agents like the television, and newspapers, amongst many others. This free access to the media for information related to the actions of the political leaders, in terms of various policies and legislations and their consequential aspects, are essential for the proper functioning of a democratic country. “It ensures that citizens make responsible, informed choices... [While] information serves a “checking function” by ensuring that elected representatives uphold their oaths of office and carry out the wishes of those who elected them” (Centre for Democracy and Governance, 3).

Though the old school political science scholars were more skeptical of the effect of media on the general public (Patterson and McClure, 1970), modern-day researchers have shown that media has a strong influence on the beliefs and opinions of its viewers or readers. Recent writings have claimed that the effect of media in shaping the general public’s views on the various political parties in the US and elsewhere is ‘massive’ (Graber, 2007). Petrocik tells us, “The press [in the modern context] is consequential because voters need information about candidates to make a choice that corresponds to their preferences” (136).

In the US there have been observed that there are two modes of conducting an inquiry into the effects of media on the general public. While one branch of inquiry seeks information on the power of the media to effectively persuade the general public, the other branch which comprises more generic content explores the psychological process of this persuasion, and thus relates to the credibility of the news served to the readers or viewers (Druckman and Lupia, 2000). Persuasion is more likely, when the media that is disseminating the news is seen to be trustworthy, or have characteristics that label it to be veracious (Zaller, 1992, 121).

The two separate forms of inquiry into the literature highlighting the persuasiveness of the media and its credibility to the general public have led to speculations as to whether the scope and nature of the media’s ascendency are dependent on the public’s demeanor towards them. Such speculations have risen from the fact that it has been observed that the US public opinion on the credibility of the news media has varied over time, and has been seen to move on a downward curve in recent times. In recent years, various researchers have claimed that many of the general public are worried over the fact that political opinions may be cleverly manipulated by the media, and this media slant may in turn lead the voters to become biased unknowingly, thus leading to election results that are biased or even biased political decisions.