This is my last blog post for my Mass Media and Politics
class. Thus being said, I will focus on what I believe the future will look
like in regards to politics and the media. I have spent a good amount of my
posts talking about how I believe the focus and concentration of the media is
way off balance. What I mean by this is that the American people know more
about a politician’s personal life than they know about his/her policy views.
We have seen this focus grow at a fast rate starting with the Nixon Watergate
scandal. Once the media focused their attention on this, Congress had no other
choice but to launch an extensive investigation. Soon after came the Clinton
sex scandal. During this scandal there was so much going on both domestically
and internationally. Did the media purposely focus on this story to distract
the American people from something else? Then when George W. Bush was running
for office, the media felt the need to bring up a DUI situation that happened
more than twenty years ago. Here is an article written in 2000 to show that
they brought the incident to light: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2000/11/bush-n04.html
. My point to all of this is that the media focuses so much attention on the
politicians’ personal lives, and they should rather be focusing on their policy
issues. I believe that FDR would not win the presidential election is he was
running in today’s political world. The media would grab a hold of the fact that
he was in a wheelchair and would somehow make him look weak. It is a shame that
we live in a political world like this, and I believe that this focus is only
going to continue to increase in the future.
Another issue I have discussed in depth is how big of an
impact social media has had on the mass media and politics. The three big sites
I think of when I see social media are: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Facebook has 1.19 billion active users; Twitter has 500 million users; YouTube
has 1 billion users. http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/resource-how-many-people-use-the-top-social-media/4/
. I bring this stat up because it shows how many people are involved in
technology and communicating with other people on the internet. In one of my
previous posts I brought up a stat regarding twitter and the presidential
debates. Twitter and other social media sites have integrated themselves in
these debates to get the people more involved and more interested in the
political process. While this is certainly a good thing, I believe it can also
be bad because of the fact that Americans now expect to know every little thing
that is going on in Washington D.C. I have called for less transparency in
certain situations, such as when congress is debating a bill. I call for this
because I believe that there will be more compromise when the two main parties
can speak freely with each other without having to worry about whether they are
upsetting the voters of their party. Thus being said, I believe the future of
social media will continue to grow at an exponential rate, and when the masses
speak out the politicians and media will listen. Less transparency will be
nearly impossible to happen. It will be in the near future that all new young
politicians will have to worry about every little thing in their past. I do not
believe this is a good path for American politics.
To conclude, I believe that America will continue to become
more polarized in the coming years. The big media sites are continuing to
become more opinionated and more partisan. This in turn creates a more
polarized society that makes it hard for any compromise to ever happen. I
believe we will continue to see the mass media focus on unimportant issues
about the personal lives of politicians as well as what each celebrity is doing
in their free time. While there are media sites that are nonpartisan and
unbiased, they are relatively small and cannot compete with the big
conglomerate news companies that have tens of millions of viewers on a weekly
basis. I hope that the American people will soon call for a new news station
that presents the facts as they are, and does not favor one political party
over the other. America has the ability to become even more prosperous, but
this begins with things like the mass media focusing on important issues, and
politicians not having to worry about pleasing a certain political party. Once
the big parties can put pride to the side and start focusing on what really
needs to get done, this is when American will become stronger and more
prosperous.
