Future of Media and Politics

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.