What Role Does the Media Play in Politics Research Paper

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Introduction

Media plays a powerful role in politics in a variety of ways. Social media allows individuals to communicate ideas to followers. President Trump used social media—particularly Twitter—to great effect on the campaign trail, often firing off tweets to attack his political opponents. Supporters and critics alike have used social media to alter the way people view politics. One group in particular that has received a lot of focus from the media is the African American population. The African American vote is a very important vote in politics because this population has the potential to swing an election, to turn a blue state red or a red state blue. The media, however, is only as powerful as those who wield it. That is why whether it is CNN, Fox News or Twitter users, the aim is always the same—to alter the views of the target audience and sway them to embrace the message that is being delivered. The research question this paper asks is: Has the media altered the way African Americans view politics? The answer it proposes is that the media is always attempting to alter the way African Americans view politics, both on the right and on the left. CNN, for example, will run stories about how Republicans do not care about blacks. Fox News, on the other hand, will run stories about how Trump has put African Americans back to work in increasing numbers. Kanye West will tweet about his love for President Trump while wearing a red MAGA hat. In short the media is a powerful tool that is constantly being used to alter the way in which African Americans view and feel about politics. This paper will show how that is done in more detail by looking at the idea of soft power, at what both right and left spectrums of the media are doing, at popular media, and particularly at what Robinson (2002) calls the “CNN effect”—the use of images and stories of human desolation typically used to garner support for humanitarian interventions abroad but also useful for rousing ire and antipathy against political opponents at home.

Soft Power

Soft power refers to the ability to sway the opinions of people by using subtle, non-forceful and non-coercive images and studies to shape a narrative and move public opinion. Soft power is something that media is especially good at. Seib (2009) notes that “the effective exercise of soft power depends largely on its being a part of a comprehensive, well-designed public diplomacy effort” (p. 780). Today’s media conglomerates are part of a large industry that is really dominated by a handful of families and corporate entities. Dreier (1982) pointed out decades ago that by concentrating the power of the media in the hands of a few, it was easier for these groups to control narratives and the flow of information. People did not have to be hit over the head with batons like in a Soviet State. Instead, they could be moved to think the way the owners of mass media wanted them to think by always turning on their TVs and listening to the stories on the radio.

For this reason, the media has been called the “fourth estate” because of its ability to frame political narratives and paint political problems in the shades and shadows of its own choosing (Dreier, 1982, p. 298). In the old world, three estates dominated the way people thought about things: the church, the noble class (kings and dukes and lords and so on), and the common class (the rabble). Today, the fourth estate—the mass media—has perhaps the most powerful voice of all, for it is everywhere one looks—restaurants, bars, airports, bedrooms, living rooms, dens, cars, phones, computers. Whereas dukes and lords would in the past use force to get the public to do something, the media can use its soft power—its subtle manipulation of the mind through stories designed to have an emotional impact—to move them.

The soft power effect can be seen on both sides of the right and left political spectrum. If CNN represents the left and Fox News the right, the stories that these two mainstream media sources put out to capture the attention of African Americans are telling of how they use soft power to steer this demographic. Maxine Waters and Cory Booker are two examples of African Americans who are widely given media coverage; however, Waters has been both critical of President Obama and President Trump—Obama for not doing enough to help African American communities and Trump for just about everything (Dyson, 2016). However, when it comes to how Waters is covered, it depends on the network and the message they are trying to get out. Fox News, for example, will replay footage of Waters calling on supporters to “get in the faces” of people in the Trump Administration in order to build a narrative about how insane the left is and how biased they are from a political point of view (Flood, 2018).

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This is an example of how the right uses soft power. CNN, however, takes the same story and spins it in a sympathetic light to show that Waters’ remarks were taken out of context and that she is entitled to her opinion (Erhlich, 2018). This is how the left uses soft power. Both have an impact on the African American community and its perspective on politics.

Popular Media

The study by DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007) showed that African Americans make up only a small percentage of the viewership of Fox News: the primary demographic consists of white conservatives. CNN on the other hand scores bigger with African Americans: indeed, both CNN and The New York Times employ “a handful of Black journalists” and “by all measures, African Americans enjoy more power within the media industries” (Squires, 2009, p. 10). By representing African Americans among their ranks, left-leaning media outlets can hope to capture more of that audience, which aligns with the custom of the Democratic Party to typically appeal to the African American community. CNN is thus able to better appeal to African American voters and craft narratives that favor their sensibilities.

Outliers like Kanye West and the social media YouTube sensations Diamond and Silk, who have appeared on Fox News to show that “black people are behind President Trump” (Fox News, 2018) have to carve out their own niche by using social media—i.e., independent media—to gain an audience. West does so using Twitter and Diamond and Silk, who are die-hard Trump supporters have done so with YouTube. West, Diamond and Silk differ in their messages to African Americans from the message cultivated by the left-leaning mainstream media sources. They generally put out messages that are very favorable of President Trump and they attack the Democratic message. This has an effect on the African American community too. Rasmussen polls show that Trump is polling at 36% among African Americans (Cummings, 2018). In response to that new item that showed Trump was actually more popular among the African American community than the left-leaning media would have that community think, the left-leaning Washington Post put out an article that denied the poll completely with the headline: “No, one-third of African Americans don’t support Trump. Not even close” (Tesler, 2018). This back and forth between right and left, with each denying the news that the other creates has led to the “fake news” effect, which Trump himself has cited, often pointing to his antagonists in the media as being the sources of fake news and even going so far as to ban CNN’s Jake Acosta from the White House recently because of the latter’s refusal to hand over the microphone to an aid after Trump wished to move on to take questions from another reporter. There is an obvious tension in American politics at the moment and the media is front and center of it—or rather right at the heart of it. The African American community is being targeted by all sides of the media, and their opinions matter because they make up a large voting segment.

Part of the problem for left-leaning media is that the black vote was unmotivated by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and thus did not turn out to support her in great enough numbers for her to win (Jackson, Davis & Alston, 2017). Jackson et al. (2017) found that “the lower black turnout itself is attributable to several factors, but one factor specifically in the LIS realm was the prevalence of low-quality information and rhetoric and a susceptibility that some black voters had to this low-quality information and rhetoric” (p. 236). The “low-quality information” that the African American community was being fed is a subjective conclusion, as there is no great digital divide in the U.S. barring the African American community from gaining access to information from the Internet or from television and radio news sources. The problem in 2016 was simply that blacks were….....

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