Media And Politics Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This article first defines the media in the context of the rapidly changing contemporary environment and then reviews fundamental dynamics of media and politics within the framework of a three-way relationship among the media, politicians/government, and the public, paying attention to differences across political and media systems. It then briefly discusses key changes in the international media environment.

Defining Media

At the outset it is important to realize that media systems vary across countries and political systems. Media are very much creatures of their political environment, taking on different characteristics in each society according to the development of literacy and other conditions that create markets for their products, the degree to which journalism has become professionalized in the society, the degree of political polarization within the society, and the degree of formal autonomy from government granted in that society. We therefore cannot easily generalize about the media’s role in politics across different political systems.

The situation in the United States, where the fragmented structure of the political system requires politicians to win favorable attention from the mass media if they want to bring about major policy change, differs significantly from the situation in Russia, where political power is more concentrated and the media are not fully autonomous from the government, and it differs still more from the situation in North Korea, whose media have long ranked among the least independent in the world. Even across democratic political systems, we find substantial differences in, for example, media partisanship: While Americans typically expect news to be objective and nonpartisan, the citizens of many other democracies, from Great Britain to the Scandinavian to the Mediterranean states, are accustomed to news outlets that are openly partisan. This essay focuses primarily on the media’s role in liberal democratic systems, especially the United States, while adding examples from other systems where relevant; we then explore the role of the increasingly globalized media industry—and its regional challengers in some parts of the world—in the international arena.

Defining the media has become rather complicated in an era when newspapers, magazines, radio, and broadcast television all compete with twenty-four-hour cable television and the Internet for the limited attention of the general public. Media can be defined as organizations that control the means of mass communication. In the United States, these organizations are mostly for-profit businesses; in other industrialized countries, fully or partially government-owned-and-operated media are more common, often operating alongside profit-oriented media. In other words, “the media” are those who own and/or operate the technologies—the printing presses, airwave channels, cable networks—by which a society communicates with itself and with the rest of the world. This definition extends beyond the leading, mainstream media to cable networks and television shows that target particular audiences and subpopulations (such as Univision and Telemundo, the two largest Spanish-language networks in the United States) and to the millions of political websites on the Internet, some of which (those that tend to have the largest audiences) are owned and operated by the same corporations that dominate the mainstream media, and many more of which (with generally smaller audiences) are more individualized and user generated.

In democratic societies, the mass media carry a broad variety of political messages and information, ranging from news that is ostensibly independent of particular politicians to political advertising created by candidates, their opponents, political parties, and independent political groups. Thus, the media’s role in politics also varies in terms of the types of political messages the various media feature. When they produce independent political journalism and commentary, the media play a different role in politics than when they simply serve as a platform for various political actors’ direct appeals to the public through political advertising or free air time for political speeches and events.

“News” has also become somewhat difficult to define. The lines between hard news and entertainment have blurred considerably over the past three decades, as economic pressures and audience changes have reduced the amount of airtime/ space devoted to traditional hard news about elections and policy issues and increased coverage of “soft” news issues such as crime, health, and other human interest stories. The multiplication of media outlets, especially due to the development of cable television and the Internet, has fragmented the mass media audience so that various segments of the public are exposed to very different levels of political information. During U.S. elections, for example, elite newspapers like The New York Times carry a heavy dose of political news every day but have a small national audience, while the evening network news has a much larger audience that sees less political news, and many local television news programs—the main source of news for many Americans—offer very little election news at all. In Great Britain, the publicly funded channel BBC One, which features high-quality reporting on public affairs, is a leading source of news, although the audience for the “broadsheet” newspapers and their serious news content is much smaller.

Meanwhile, competing sources of political news have arisen that challenge both the definition of news and the top down, journalist-controlled method of producing it. Political websites and blogs (frequently updated interactive Web sites, often maintained by nonjournalists) and soft news TV shows such as Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, now play an influential role in how citizens think about public policy and world affairs, while comedy and talk shows offer an alternative way for citizens to engage in politics. A significant number of young people in particular encounter politics through Internet-based social networking sites and on user controlled media such as YouTube, where people can post everything from a candidate gaffe captured on their cell phones to professional-looking “ads” for their favorite candidates. The traditional media have responded in a variety of ways to the rise of user-controlled media. In Great Britain, for example, the BBC launched iPM, a version of its flagship radio program in which viewers were asked to “shape what you know” by determining the order of items on the program. At the same time, politicians in some countries are using entertainment formats to advance their political agendas. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, for example, stars in his own weekly television program, Aló Presidente (Hello, President), in which he explains his government’s policies, publicly embarrasses his critics, and even serenades his audience.

Thinking about the role of the media in politics therefore requires us to think in broad terms. Media is a plural noun that encompasses a wide array of organizations and individuals producing a wide array of content—some politically substantive, some less so, but all potentially affecting how citizens think about and engage with politics.

The Media, Citizens, And Government In Elections And Governing

To understand the role of the media in politics, it is useful to place that vast array of media organizations in the framework of a three-way relationship with the public and political leaders. During elections and during the course of day-to-day governing in today’s industrialized democracies, the flow of most political communication passes through the mass media. A crucial question is the degree to which the media themselves make decisions about which stories and issues to cover and how to cover them. In liberal democracies, given the relative autonomy of the press from the government, the media become a filter through which most consequential political messages pass and an active mediator between the public and political leaders. In authoritarian systems in which there is little meaningful media autonomy, the media are less a filter and more a megaphone for political leaders’ policies, priorities, and pronouncements. These generalizations, however, gloss over the ways in which media organizations in authoritarian regimes may subtly seek to undermine the government’s message (an interesting example is al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based network that has enraged authoritarian governments in the Arab world); such generalizations may also overlook the degree to which the media in liberal democracies may simply pass along government messages without much critical scrutiny.

In democracies in particular, the media’s central position between the government and the public has important consequences for both elections and governing. During elections, the media play a central role in what voters learn about campaign issues and the candidates, who make their case to the voters primarily via the mass media, either through political advertising or by gaining news coverage (known inside the business as “earned” media). Indeed, the political consulting industry has grown dramatically in democracies around the world over the past two decades, as political leaders have had to learn how to communicate effectively via the mass media to voters. (Perhaps not coincidentally, voter disaffection with politics is on the rise around the world as well.)

The role of media in voter choice may not be as direct and powerful as is sometimes assumed, however. Decades of research have shown that in many cases, the main impact of media on voter choice is to reinforce people’s preexisting attitudes rather than to change them. Very few voters with firm partisan commitments will be lured across party lines to vote for the candidate of the opposing party simply on the basis of exposure to political ads or election news. Rather, to the degree that they pay attention to politics, those voters’ voting intentions will tend to be reinforced during the course of a campaign, because they will more readily accept congenial political messages while rejecting messages from the opposing side. This dynamic seems especially likely in countries like Great Britain and France, where the press is highly partisan, and voters often turn to news outlets that match their own political predispositions, thus making persuasion across party lines even less likely (a situation that some scholars argue increasingly pertains to the United States as well).

Thus the main persuasive impact of political ads and election news tends to be limited to that relatively small group of voters who pay attention to politics but lack partisan roots—the so-called swing voter. This media impact should not be dismissed, however. In many recent U.S. presidential elections, the margin of victory of the winning candidate has been relatively small, increasing the importance of swing voters and thus of persuasive messages in the media. Moreover, the media’s role in helping candidates to mobilize their likely voters—getting voters interested and excited enough to turn out to vote— should not be underestimated.

The media play other important roles during elections, particularly in political systems like those of the United States in which campaign contributions play a vital role. Candidates who win media coverage gain greater name recognition with the public—and thus improve their ability to raise campaign funds. The reverse also holds true: Candidates who cannot generate sustained media attention are unlikely to rank high in the opinion polls that help determine whether contributors will give them money. The tone, and not simply the amount, of media coverage is also important, since candidates who receive consistent, highly negative media coverage would be unlikely to gain broad voter support. Yet in this respect as well, the media’s role in elections may not be simple. Indeed, in many U.S. presidential elections, the candidates who win the most media coverage are also subjected to increasing amounts of critical coverage as election day approaches. U.S. senator Barack Obama managed to buck this trend to some extent in the election of 2008—he was one of very few recent candidates to win generally positive news coverage throughout the election. But often, the winning candidate wins despite news coverage that is rather negative.

Ultimately, one of the most important implications of the media’s role in contemporary elections is that the media can set the agenda of an election by determining which issues and candidate attributes will receive the most attention. In liberal democracies, the news media are expected to question and investigate candidates on behalf of the public, serving as the public’s proxy in vetting the candidates and their policy positions. In reality, the issues and character attributes that dominate news coverage are largely determined by the media’s professional and economic incentives. As competition among news outlets increases, news organizations need good stories that will draw the attention of an increasingly fragmented and distracted audience. Consequently, campaign news may be dominated by “horse race” coverage that focuses on who is winning and losing more than on complicated policy issues, and “character” coverage that focuses on candidates’ personalities and campaign gaffes. In the United States, where voters’ partisan attachments have become particularly weak and the political parties have decentralized the process of selecting presidential candidates, the media have become so central to elections that, it is often said, the road to the White House leads through the newsroom. Media-centered politics are not quite as pronounced in democracies in which political parties play a more meaningful role in structuring voter choice. One result of media-centered elections may be impoverished voter decision making. Ironically, media-centric elections may make it harder for voters to gain the substantive information that theorists of democracy often assume.

Key Media Dynamics

In the context of daily governing, we again find the media in a central position. In virtually all political systems, the general public will not learn about most of what the government does unless they learn of it through the media. In the United States, where there are no government-owned and government-controlled media whose job it is to disseminate governmental messages unfiltered, those in government who want to raise awareness about a public problem or mobilize public support for a new piece of legislation, or to defeat legislation, must win favorable media attention for their cause—no small feat in an era when most media organizations pay less and less attention to politics. Moreover, the American system of checks and balances, relatively weak political parties, and divisions of power among federal and state-level institutions makes the media crucial to most major policy initiatives.

Conversely, the media may also communicate the public’s views to political leaders. Thinking back to the three-way relationship proposed above, the media mediate communication traveling both down from government to the public and up from the public to government. Much of what politicians know about public opinion they learn through the media, especially through public opinion polls that the media conduct and/or report. Many of the same U.S. news organizations that transmit political news to the public also query the public on its views through public opinion polls (e.g., the CBS News/New York Times poll and the Washington Post/ABC News poll). Here again, the media’s power to filter and shape political discourse must be noted, for media polls often reflect the issue agendas that the media themselves help to define.

Nevertheless, in most political systems, the primary direction of communication is from government through the media to the public. In authoritarian systems with little media autonomy, this process is rather direct. In more democratic political systems, political leaders must set the agenda by focusing public attention and political energy on the issues they want to address. To the degree that the media are autonomous from government, a crucial dynamic of media and politics arises, as various leaders and groups vie to win attention and support for their preferred policy agendas. While research shows that in many countries officials are the leading sources quoted in the news, the competition may extend to other political actors— interest groups, social movements, and activists—whose path to political influence also runs through the newsroom.

Research also shows that the public’s sense of the important issues needing attention is significantly influenced (though not entirely determined) by media coverage. The public’s agenda, in other words, reflects the issues portrayed most prominently in the news. Issues gaining heavy media coverage are also the issues most likely to influence how people evaluate their elected leaders. The first president Bush, for example, learned this law of media and politics when his public approval ratings dropped from historic highs when the first Gulf War (1990–1991) was the most prominent news story to lows in the mid-30 percent range once the war was concluded, and an economic recession became the main news story. As this example suggests, an additional challenge for elected leaders is to guide the media toward the issues that reflect best upon those leaders.

Another challenge for all those who would influence the news (during elections as well as in the course of governing) is to frame the issues to highlight particular attributes and concerns. The concept of framing is used to talk about how news stories emphasize or deemphasize different aspects of the reality they report on. Experimental research has demonstrated that news frames can influence how people think about problems like terrorism, poverty, and racial inequality—for example, whether they view these primarily as problems of individual behavior or as problems affected and solved by governmental intervention. As with all media effects, however, framing effects are partial and contingent, and other research has shown that the public does not always adopt the frames emphasized in the news.

In most political systems, the frames found most often in the news are those put forth by political officials. One study of news coverage of conflicts in the Middle East, for example, concluded that Israeli political officials enjoy a metaphorical “royal gate” into the news arena, which gives them advantages over other groups that compete to enter the arena and frame the conflict. Even though in liberal democracies the media are formally independent from government, the media tend to follow the lead of high officials and limit news frames to those that elites are discussing and debating, particularly when covering matters concerning national security. Scholars call this dynamic, in which reporters tie the topics and slant of their stories to the views expressed by high political officials, “indexing.”

Another powerful determinant of news framing of international conflicts is nationalism. We can see both indexing and nationalism at work in the differing coverage of the vexing issue of torture that arose during the war in Iraq (2003–). While many U.S. news outlets were hesitant to openly challenge the Bush administration’s claims about the U.S. military’s treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and other detention facilities, news coverage in European countries was routinely more critical. These examples remind us that across a variety of political systems, the media can be a powerful conduit of official messages and a key shaper of public perceptions of one’s country and the world.

Globalized Media And International Politics

We cannot discuss the role of media in politics without also considering how the media matter in the international arena. In an era of globalization, in which national boundaries are less meaningful and the very concept of the nation-state seems in decline, the rise of global media conglomerates (most of which are Western owned) is significant. Indeed, these media conglomerates are often accused of colonizing local cultures, spreading (or imposing) Western political and cultural values, and subjecting the rest of the world to their “Western gaze.” At the same time, the rise of nearly instantaneous global communication has profoundly impacted political decision making in the international arena, leading some to fear a “CNN effect” in which the hand of government is forced by media coverage of dramatic and disturbing events abroad. (The examples of U.S. interventions in Somalia and Yugoslavia in the 1990s are often given.) While research suggests that government policy has not followed media coverage in so simplistic a fashion, it is nevertheless true that citizens around the world, thanks to media technologies, are much more aware of one another’s plights than ever before, and governments must make decisions more quickly and deliberate less. (As former British prime minister Tony Blair once observed, leaders must now respond to international events “in real time.”)

At the same time, old boundaries remain, especially around how national media cover their countries’ perspectives on and involvement in international conflicts. Studies show that the U.S. media largely covered the initial phase of the U.S.-led war in Iraq (2003–) from a relatively uncritical perspective, focusing on the advancement of U.S. troops and the fall of Saddam Hussein. U.S. news coverage was considerably more favorable toward the war effort than were the German and British media, while Arab networks like al-Jazeera showed much more graphic imagery of civilian casualties and aired much more extensive criticism of the war.

Bibliography:

Baum, Matthew. Soft News Goes to War. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Bennett,W. Lance, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston. When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Buchanan, Bruce. “Mediated Electoral Democracy: Campaigns, Incentives, and Reform.” In Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy. Edited by W. Lance Bennett and Robert M. Entman, 362–379. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Cook, Timothy E. Governing with the News:The News Media as a Political Institution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Entman, Robert M. Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Hallin, Daniel, and Paolo Mancini. Comparing Media Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Iyengar, Shanto. Is Anyone Responsible? How Television News Frames Political Issues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Iyengar, Shanto, and Adam Simon. “News Coverage of the Gulf Crisis and Public Opinion.” In Taken by Storm. Edited by W. Lance Bennett and David L. Paletz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
McCombs, Maxwell E., and Donald R. Shaw. The Emergence of American Political Issues:The Agenda-setting Function of the Press. Eagan, Minn.:West Group, 1977.
Oates, Sarah. Introduction to Media and Politics. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2008.
Patterson,Thomas E. Out of Order. New York:Vintage, 1994.
Prior, Markus. Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Sanders, Karen. Communicating Politics in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave, 2009.
Wolfsfeld, Gadi. Media and Political Conflict: News from the Middle East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Zaller, John R. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

This example Media And Politics Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.