One of the most famous cases deals with former Congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner sent sexually inappropriate pictures from his Twitter account to women. Weiner initially denied sending the pictures and stated multiple times that his account had been hacked ("Rep. Anthony Weiner's Sexting Scandal: Why Did He Do It?"). Eventually, he did admit that he had sent the pictures and later resigned from Congress in 2011 (Bianco and Canon 245). In 2013, Weiner decided to run for New York City mayor. During the campaign, it came to light that even after Weiner had resigned from Congress, he continued to send sexually inappropriate pictures to women ("New York Mayoral Candidate Anthony Weiner Says Explicit Photo Is of Him"). However, his Twitter sex scandals stayed with him and Weiner only received about 5% of the vote in the primary election ("New York City 2013 Primaries (LIVE RESULTS)"). Another example of how the media has been detrimental to politicians was during the 2012 Presidential election with Republican candidate Mitt Romney. While at a fundraising event, Romney made a comment that 47% of Americans believe that they are entitled and that the government should give them what they need and that they will vote for President Obama no matter what. His said that his job is not to worry about the 47% because he will never convince them otherwise. A video of Romney’s comment surfaced when …show more content…
Numerous media outlets ranted and raged over the immoral and political inappropriate acts for countless days. Due to the amount of coverage that these acts received, one has to wonder how the various news programs decided how to portray these stories and stories in general. The majority, if not all, of the news outlets use techniques called filtering, slant, framing and priming. By using these techniques the media and news stations can skew the story to their personal political allegiance. With the process of filtering, the media decides which stories to cover and which stories to neglect. A natural consequence of this story selection process is that, obviously, some events get told and some do not. With these decisions, editors generally decide which stories to tell based on which ones will receive the most viewings. For example, Michael Jackson’s death and the Iranian presidential election both occurred at the same time. However, the news stations chose to showcase Jackson’s death over the election because they knew it would get more views although overall the election was more important. Jackson’s death took up 60% of the news coverage while the election only took up 7% ("Coverage of Jackson's Death Seen As Excessive"). The second tactic is slant. This is when the news spends too much time on one aspect of a topic is does not give the