Media Coverage On Presidential Elections

Media coverage on politics is an important and influential factor in the election process. For many years, there were only certain ways in which information could be spread to American voters about the candidates. Public speeches, newspapers, television commercials, and merchandise are some successful ways to campaign. However, for the past two U.S. presidential elections there has been a new way of campaigning that appears to have more of an impact than the usual ways of candidate advertizing. In the presidential election, there is often debate about the different views, beliefs, and stances that each candidate has. Media coverage of both parties is important for their running in the election. Since the 2008 presidential election, the social

A key component for the election is whether or not each candidate has been portrayed fairly and if the coverage on them is accuarate. In an article by Jacob Groshek and Ahmed Al-Rawi "Public Sentiment and Critical Framing in Social Media Content During the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election" there are explanations how social media has affected the election. Commonly during any election there are false representations of the candidates and even negative assumptions made about each other to gain more voters. "Key findings include the fact that contrary to what one might expect, neither presidential candidate was framed in an overly critical manner in his opponent's Facebook space or on Twitter's dedicated nonpartisan election page." Unlike past political media, the social media coverage on politics was now more effected with less false and negative information being brought into the

Carlisle and Robert C. Patton published “Is Social Media Changing How We Understand Political Engagement? An Analysis of Facebook and the 2008 Presidential Election” in the Political Research Quarterly. “Understanding how the Internet, in a general sense, affects political and civic engagement is indeed important and much has been learned from such research. Nevertheless, there is a gap in our understanding of how online social networks (e.g., Facebook) foster political engagement and activity.” Their research hopes to fill this gap. “More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior” an article by Joseph DiGrazia from the department of sociology at Indiana University, shows research explaining how social media may be an indicator of political behavior. This research will help explain if social media does effect political behavior. In the research, data will be extracted from social media to study its effects on offline behavior. I feel that this research is important because it will help explain how important social media is and also could help predict future election winners by analyzing the effective social media coverage on each candidate. The finding from the research shows that reliable data about political behavior can be extracted from social