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Chapter 6: The Mass Media |
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The most important new development in the collection, organization, and distribution of information of all kinds is its digitalization and easy access to this digitalized information by millions upon millions of interconnected computers and servers linked together into a vast network called the internet. The rise in the use of the internet, whether from broadband connections in homes, schools, libraries, and the workplace-and increasingly from handheld devices such as PDAs and cellphones-has been stunning. In 2004, 63 percent of Americans said they used the internet (only 43 percent for African Americans, however, and only 25 percent for people over the age of 65), while 60 million claim to have broadband connections in their homes, up from 6 million in 2000.1 97 million people have used government Web sites. 84 million have used the internet to look for political news or for information about candidates and political campaigns. Another indicator of the prominent place of the internet in the U.S. are data showing that Americans host far more internet servers than people anywhere else, including the rich democracies. Here are a few other numbers from 2004; on a typical day:2
To be sure, most people use the internet for such non-political activities as sending and receiving email, sharing photos, arranged travel and vacations, participating in on-line auctions, shopping for products, playing interactive games, and more. But many millions use it, as the numbers above suggest, to examine candidate, party, government, and advocacy group web sites, read commentaries at political and ideologically-oriented blog sites (where they can add their own comments), read materials on the Web sites of news organizations (newspapers, magazines, television networks and stations, and the like), make contributions to candidates, parties, and advocacy organizations, listen to political podcasts, and access public affairs information from on-line university and public libraries, as well as from proliferating on-line encyclopedia-type sites such as Wikipedia and infoplease.
The internet has also become important in other ways that are relevant for politics. For one thing, emailing has become an important instrument by which people contact public officials to express their views, a much easier way to make contact with them than the traditional method of writing and posting letters. The internet has also become a way for political activists of every persuasion to organize protests and demonstrations, publicize and raise money for their causes, and bring pressure to bear on public officials. The internet has finally come of age, moreover in political campaigns. Howard Dean was a pioneer in this development in his run in 2004 for the Democratic presidential nomination. Before then, candidates had not tapped the full potential of the Internet. Virtually all candidates for federal office had Websites by the time of the 2000 and 2002 electoral cycle, but the sites were mainly passive in character, places for posting policy papers and news of the candidate. Dean's campaign, relied heavily on e-mail to contact and build a network of supporters, particularly among younger computer-literate voters, asking for their help, attendance at rallies, and financial contributions. The response shocked the political pros, and moved Dean to the front rank of contenders for the nomination months before the first primary in the snows of New Hampshire.
We will have more to say about these uses of the internet as we examine social movements, interest groups, parties, and campaigns in later chapters. For now, we are interested in the internet as a source of news and information, sometimes in competition with, sometimes in conjunction with, the news media: newspapers, television, magazines, and radio. The point to be made here is that the internet-in the form of the Web-is an incredibly vast source for political and public affairs news and information, some of it filtered by editorial processes typical of other news media outlets, but much of it uncontrolled, unconfirmed, speculative, passionate, and sometimes hysterical. These characteristics make the medium quite compelling as a source of news and information, but one that must be used with great care. 3
Whether citizens get from the news media the kinds of information they need for democracy to work properly depends on how the media are organized and function. In the remainder of this chapter, we focus on news media organizations and journalists, rather than on the various and exotic new forms of media because despite the rise of the Web, and despite the fragmentation of existing news media outlets, most people still get their news from fairly traditional sources.4 Television remains, for example, the main source of news for most people-whether network or cable news stations, or local news outlets-and much of what is on television news is, in turn, shaped by the treatment of the news in the nation's leading newspapers, particularly the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. And, much of the news content on the Web at popular sites, such as Yahoo, Google, and AOL, are provided by traditional news organizations. So, we want to know how the news media are organized, how they fashion the news, and what effects they have on politics and government.
1Trends, 2005, p. 63.
2Trends, 2005, chapter 4, p. 58.
3Kovach and Rosenstiel, Warp Speed, pp. 52-57.
4Robert S. Erikson and Kent L. Tedin, American Public Opinion (New York: Pearson Longman Publishers, 2005), p. 219.
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