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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 4 page research paper that evaluates the role of the media in shaping American political opinion. The writer argues that while the media does not tell the public what to think, it does succeed in telling us what to think about, that is, it sets the public agenda through its selection of the issues to receive news coverage. Bibliography lists 2 sources.
Page Count:
4 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_khmedrol.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
Spanish-American War followed in 1898. The fact that the media of the day greatly influenced public opinion to favor going to war with Spain over the issue of Cuban independence
is a matter of historical record. This brings up the question of whether or not the modern media still has such power. With a presidential election soon to take place,
the question arises as to "What role, if any, does the media play in shaping American political opinion? In recent years, Tsfati (2003) reports that public trust in the
mainstream news media has been on the decline. Gallup polls conducted over the last several decades show that the percentage of the public saying they have a "great deal" or
a "fair" amount of "trust and confidence" in the mass media has fallen from 70 percent in the early 1970s to 55 percent by 1998 (Tsfati, 2003). Simultaneously, the percentage
of the public stating that they have "not very much" confidence in the mass media, or even "none at all," has increased from 30 to 44 percent (Tsfati, 2003). This
trend has steadily escalated from the mid-1980s to the present. If the public does not trust the media, the question that scholars ask is can the media still be influential.
According to the scholars who research this topic, the media is responsible for presenting to the public a variety of issues that are considered to be significant. As one
research article puts it, "the press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what
to think about" (Tsafati, 2003). In other words, the public may or may not readily accept the opinions and descriptions of current events that they read in the papers
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