The Role Of The Media In Democracy

How much does your vote really count? As a voter, does your choice really matter? How much influence does the media have on your vote? How many choices does the media actually make when it comes to our nation's leadership? These are questions pondered by both political scientists and the average American citizen each year as the second Tuesday in November approaches. Though we know that the framers founded this nation on the principles of representing it's citizens, and on the ideals of a nation for the people and by the people; it is obvious that the people feel that their vote doesn't always count. In this paper I plan to expand on these questions and the justifications behind asking them, and I plan to follow up with a specific example in which the media played a highly significant role in the choice of high government officials.

How much does your vote really count? Does your choice really matter? According to the framers, your choice does matter. They say that one man equals one vote. Congress also seems to believe that the American vote should count. They have passed Amendments to the Constitution in order to give more people the chance to vote and the chance to make a choice of their representatives. But why then does the people actually directly elect so few officials? Perhaps they agree with the ideas of Converse and Lane and are using voting only as a way to attempt to get the citizens out of the voting slump they seem to be in. Converse stated that voters are minimally informed, minimally capable, and therefore incompetent of voting. Lane claims that this is not the problem, but that instead, voters are simply lazy in their ideology. (Muraca, July 13, 1999) I tend to agree with both, but I don't feel that the fault lies on the shoulders of the people. Rather, I feel that the burden of voter incompetence lies on the shoulders of the media. Voters are not uninformed perse, but they are limited in the amount in information that they posses. The reason that this information is limited is because of the media. Media makes the choice everyday what they do and do not want the public to know. The power to make the choice of our knowledge rests in their hands. Without the information they pass on from day to day, we, as voters know nothing about the happenings of our government. Yet on more than one occasion the media has held back information that c...

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.... It is a nation founded on free speech and freedom of the press, and the media uses these freedoms to influence some of the most important decisions that may ever occur in our country. It is somewhat scary that the fate of our nation could be put in the hands of the King of Porn, but at the same time it is somewhat invigorating. As citizens, the framers entrusted everyday citizens with the right to influence the actions and fate of our government, even if only through a small article in the newspaper. Even though they did give the media this right, and we as citizens the right to use it, they still found fault with the nation as a whole. Otherwise, citizens would have been given the chance to directly elect those they feel represent them the best. The question of why they did this remains, but the fault lies at the feet of the media for keeping the citizens left uninformed and unable to cast a reasonable vote.

Works Cited

Janda, Berry, Goldman. The Challenge of Democracy. Sixth Edition. Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

Muraca, Stephanie, T.. In-class-notes. July 13, 1999.

Shepard, Alicia, C.. "Gatekeepers Without Gates", American Journalism News Link. March 1999.