Week 2: Assignment

ThursdayOct 12 at 12:52am

Manage Discussion Entry

I believe the two most prevalent media platforms for covering politics are television and social media. The Pew Research Center found in 2016 that Americans prefer to get their news from a "screen."

The Pew study found that "TV remains the dominant screen, followed by digital. Still, TV news use is dramatically lower among younger adults, suggesting further shake-ups to come."� (Mitchell, et al, 2016, para. 1).

Given that younger voters are more likely to get their news online than from traditional television programming, it makes sense that politicians would use the internet to selectively target potential swing voters, or voters in a favorable demographic to a certain politician. As the textbook authors describe, political campaigns exploit individual user newsfeed and share functions to spread messages throughout a user's network of friends and online connections (Graber & Dunaway, 2015)

Even with the rapid increase in online/social media use for getting political news among young people, TV news consumption continues to outpace online news viewing among people 50 and older according to Pew (2016). In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 55 percent of the vote was from people age 45 and older with the largest percentage of voters overall, between 45 and 64 years old (Castillo & Schramm, 2016). Such figures provide a potential look into the future of exclusive delivery of digital content, even at the local level.

Print maintains its credibility through the work of its reporters. However, when broadcast or social media no longer need the traditional print as a source, I believe even the largest of the print papers will fail, or at least move to strictly digital delivery.

References

Castillo, W., Schramm, M. (2016, November 9). How we voted – by age, education, race and sexual orientation. USA Today College. Retrieved from http://college.usatoday.com/2016/11/09/how-we-voted-by-age-education-race-and-sexual-orientation/

Graber, D., Dunaway, J. (2015). Mass Media and American Politics, Ninth Ed. Sage Publications, Inc:Â Thousand Oaks, California.

Mitchell, A., Gottfried, J., Barthel, M., Shearer, E. (2016, July 7). Pathways to news. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-to-news/ (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.