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Media
American Government
Media
 Mass media includes television, radio, newspapers,
magazines, and the internet
 These media sources are widely responsible for the information
we receive about candidates and races
 Media events are used to control the agenda of what is being said about a
candidate or politician
Reagan
 The Reagan White House operated on the following
principles:
 Plan ahead
 Stay on the offensive
 Control the flow of information
 Limit reporters’ access to the president
 Talk about the issues you want to talk about
 Speak in one voice
 Repeat the same message many times
Press Conferences
 Press conferences are meetings with reporters to lay out the
presidential message
 FDR, the president who started presidential press conferences,
had great power over the media
 FDR would chastise poor reporters and use fear to stop reporters from
covering what he didn’t want covered
 These types of tactics ended in the late 1960’s
 With Vietnam and Watergate, many reporters turned to investigative
journalism
Media
 The first daily newspaper- 1783 (print media)
 The newspaper industry is currently in slow decline
 Radio and Television (electronic media)
 Both the radio and television opened up the amount of people
who had access to information
 With the advent of daily news shows and 24 hour news channels,
information was easily available
 Unfortunately, with the need to cover a broad range of topics news has
been boiled down to 30 second sound bites that are easy for public
consumption
Narrow
 Narrowcasting is the concept of presenting content that is
appealing to a narrow audience
 ESPN, MTV, VH1, History Channel, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC,
FOXNews
 Narrowcasting has had major impacts on how people consume
media
 Because of narrow casting people are generally only presented with
information that agrees with their own view point
Policy Impact
 Policy agenda:
 Policy agenda is the list of subjects or problems to which
government officials, and people outside of government closely
associated with those officials, are paying some serious attention
to at any time
 Healthcare, education, unemployment, immigration
 Policy entrepreneurs
 People who invest their political “capital” in an issue