Elections and Media
Kendra Higgins
B3
3/23/07
The most influential part of American society is the media. Because of it, people have been witness to numerous historical events such as inaugurations, assassinations, and acts of terrorism. We would not have been informed if it had not been for the excessive coverage from the television; however, at the same time, the television has been a continuous barrier within the political world because it emphasizes materialistic items and meaningless ideas rather than the important tasks at hand that can affect an entire nation.
The media has an arguable hold on the politics of this nation. As told in Source C, by Menand, many attribute Kennedy’s victory in the close election of 1960 to the presentation he made in two televised debates in the final months of his campaign; however, the people who listened to the debates on the radio, and did not see televised images, believed it was a draw between Nixon and Kennedy. The majority who watched the debates on the television thought that Kennedy had a “crisper” image than the badly postured Nixon. This evidence supports the fact that the television makes the voters focus on the image of the candidate rather than ideals and their intellectual responses to the questions at hand. In the 1960 election, the television had won the nation away from sound to images. It is not fair to other candidates because the other candidates could be better off running the country than a person who was won over by materialistic views. Television may make a candidate appear one way, but when they are in office they become two-faced, thus promoting the fact that more and more candidates are pursuing images more than issues. An example of this can bee seen in Source B, by Hart and Triece, where it states that Bill Clinton showed his boxers on MTV because he believed that was what the audience was looking for in order to support him as president. The media, mainly television, has the ability to control the way a nation can think as well as the way a nation can vote.