The Impact The Media Has On America’s Understanding Of The Governmental Process

The Impact The Media Has On America’s Understanding Of The Governmental Process

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
balanced.
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 & Sigelman, 1985)
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 & Kinder, 1987)
Not only do the media tell us wh……………………………………………………………..