Introduction To My Blog

Welcome to my blog about the intersection of mass media and politics! Mass media play an extremely crucial role in politics and the public's understanding of politics, and likewise mass media are impacted by the happenings of politics. Here, we will analyze instances of this connection as they play out in the real world, and relate these instances to broader concepts of mass media and its role in politics. Thank you for stopping by and I look forward to writing here weekly!

Comments

Biden's First Press Conference

After over two months of waiting, the media finally got its chance to have a formal press conference with President Biden. The lack of a press conference turned into a mini-scandal of sorts, especially on right wing media outlets, but also mainstream media as well. As a result, you might expect that the DC press corps would come armed with a wide range of questions that produce valuable, insightful answers from the new President about the many problems facing the country. But the press conference was a boring, barely newsworthy affair that's most reported on answer involved the horserace politics of an election four years away. The new President simply was somehow not asked about the pandemic that has dominated the news cycle for the last year. Instead, the majority of the questions centered on the surge of people arriving at the border from Central America. Immigration and border stories are important, and the problem isn't that he should not have been asked about that. But s...

Internet Blackouts Signal Its Power

The internet is a political force. For the last few decades, researchers have been attempting to figure just what kind of force it really is. Is it a democratic force? An authoritarian force? Neither? Both? There are good arguments to be made either way. But researchers have found that, ultimately, the internet is a tool. It can be wielded for many different purposes depending on who is doing the wielding, and it is probably a little naïve to think of the internet as containing inherent political motives. As Clay Shirky put it in Foreign Affairs, "the use of social media tools - text message, e-mail, photo sharing, social networking, and the like - does not have a single preordained outcome." We have seen the internet turn governments upside down through the power of organized protest, and we have seen propaganda and censorship plague the online world to the liking of autocrats. It varies greatly from country to country, but in each case, we can see some clues as to which sid...

The Dangerous Job of Protest Reporting

Protests are among the most powerful ways that citizens express their discontent with those in power. It follows that stories and coverage of protests are an essential and powerful form of reporting that can help people understand the events on the ground where protests unfold. But reporting from protests is also one of the more hazardous places for a journalist to be. Throughout last summer, we saw attacks and arrests increase starkly against journalists doing the important work of covering protests on the ground. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker reported a significant uptick in these incidents, and we even saw the dramatic scenarios play out on TV. CNN's Omar Jimenez was arrested on live television in Minneapolis last summer. This highly publicized event brought to the spotlight the real risks that protest reporters undertake when bringing these important stories. This of course plays out internationally as well. Over the last two months, violent clashes between protestors and the...

Mass Media and Politics

Search This Blog