Role Of Mass Media In Politics

In this discussion I call upon two movies as examples and evidence to examine the role of mass media in politics. The two movies I will use for this basis are The Candidate and All the Presidents Men. Today, the art of governing a society seems to be much dictated or prescribed by what the assemblage of the citizens of the United States say or express to the mass media. Thus, the government and politicians listening to and acting upon our very wishes and desires. Or looking at this in another point of view; The mass media relays to us as citizens the news or information about the administration as conveyed or set forth by the administration as the "truth". I believe that
the …show more content…

The films themselves assume, the characters of the candidates running for office assume, the higher ups assume and the media also makes these predictions of what the public wants to be exposed to. In a general sense a couple of these at first glance would appear to be that we as a public do not care about some things. As in All the
Presidents Men, when the two reporters first started learning of some of the wrong things that were going on in Watergate and they wanted to report on it, their superiors at the newspaper argued that it wasn't news, "nobody wants to read about that shit". Why do they predict these things, and what do they base their decisions on? Well, I believe that at first they just want to make sure they get the facts straight before diving in and printing some potentially damaging evidence, or one could also argue that they do not want to be the ones to diffuse the truth. I n The Candidate at the first banquet the new upstart attends, while giving a speech we can hear the reporter telling the cameraman,
"OK, shut it off, we got enough". The candidate had not even spoken two or three complete sentences before being cut off. Maybe a lot of people wanted to hear what he had to say, maybe not. But the media made a curt decision right there on the spot to cut short what they would show in their respective newscast.
This clearly shows that maybe