The Impact The Media Has On Americas Understanding Of The Governmental Process essays

The Impact The Media Has On America's Understanding Of The Governmental Process essays Virtually everyone agrees that the media have a profound effect on the electorate's thinking. Given their enormous influence, however, it is remarkable how little has been said about what the media should cover in a properly functioning democracy. There are pundits of various types who bemoan both the lack of focus on the issues and the excessive attention paid to the "horse race," but no one has developed a rationale to explain why this state of affairs is wrong. Because of the media's enormous influence, it is worth asking how issue and candidate coverage should be The balance of coverage provided by the media is only worth worrying about if the media are influential. Past work suggests they are, in that the media influence how voters think about the issues and also how they think about the competing candidates. With regard to issues, past work shows that documentaries, news stories, advertisements, and "docudramas" are able to shape and even change voter's minds. (Feldman Yet while the media might occasionally influence attitudes, they are more frequently effective as a spotlight. Because the media are virtually the only source of campaign information, the public will ponder only those issues bathed in the media glare. As Bernard Cohen put it, "It [the press] may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about."(Cohen, 1963) This linkage was clearly demonstrated in a set of experiments done by Shanto Iyengar and Donald Kinder in the late 1980s. They were able to show that even small doses of television news coverage were enough to cause shifts in the relative importance viewers assigned to the issues of the day. (Iyengar Not only do the m...