Social Media's Impact On Presidential Elections

The media has always served as a linkage institution, a means of connection between the people and the government, regardless of its form as either print media or as broadcast media. While the growth of technology in the last decade has allowed users to get news in a more efficient manner, it has led to the declining quality of political journalism on presidential campaign trails; the media, which once functioned to portray candidates in an honest and humane way, now cynically functions to expose every gaffe. The growth of technology has both affected how presidential campaigns are run and what the candidate’s relationship with the media is. In the election of 2000, before social media existed, presidential candidates relied on the narratives …show more content…
These are the reporters who have sacrificed their personal life to travel with candidates “on the bus” or “on the plane”. Embeds, years ago, were considered the veteran storytellers of presidential campaigns. The media, particularly newspapers, had the tradition of sending the best reporters to cover the election; they would be selected based on merit and had to work up through different beats. Now, embeds are characterized as young, angry and inexperienced. This is for several reasons: using social media, now one of the top political tools, is a characteristic of the millennials and with inadequate working experience and the limitations of the campaign bubble, millennials are angrier when it comes to working with government officials. Their inexperience, particularly, is one of the leading reasons why the media is losing its function as an agenda setter. An inexperienced embed does not know what issues matter and in what state they play a major role in; they do not understand candidates as well or see how they may be evolving over time. More importantly, they are not trained to talk to voters. Some campaigns have even complained that reporters could not interpret polls and did not know who was important when capturing stories, yet they were the ones that were …show more content…
What once started out as an innocent social networking site has become a central gathering place for politics. Now, it is where the conversation is taking place—everyone related to politics, including journalists, editors, pundits, lobbyists and television producers, is on twitter making news, when their job is to solely interpret the news. Even though a majority of journalists use twitter, is it an imperfect political medium because each tweet is limited to 140 characters, which discourages deep and analytical thinking. Not to mention, twitter has created a new type of journalism where embeds no longer have a filter or an editor that allows them to separate campaign noise from the news, essentially turning the campaign noise into news that voters pay attention to. As result, the only principle that twitter journalists believe in is speed ; in trying to be the first to capture the news or be a part of the news, they forget accuracy and depth, and make today’s political coverage more shallow and trivial. Twitter has most notably changed the nature of being “on the bus” or “on the plane” with presidential candidates. Journalists, who once tried to convey an honest image of the candidate to the public, eagerly wait on twitter for them to fall into the orchestra pit. Twitter has essentially turned the nature of traveling with candidates into a