Title: The New Media’s Role in Politics | OpenMind
Headings: The New Media’s Role in Politics
The New Media’s Role in Politics
The diversity of content disseminated by new media has created opportunities such as the ability for more voices to be heard.
The Evolution of New Media
Members of the public also were responsible for recording and posting videos that could go viral and influence the course of events.
Providing Political Information
Post-Truth Media
The Ascendance of Fake News
Objective facts are subordinate to emotional appeals and personal beliefs in shaping public opinion.
Watchdog Press or Politicians’ Mouthpiece
Conclusion
References

Content: Although legacy media coverage of political events correlates with increased political engagement among the mass public, mainstream journalists do not believe that encouraging participation is their responsibility (Hayes and Lawless, 2016). However, new media explicitly seek to directly engage the public in political activities, such as voting, contacting public officials, volunteering in their communities, and taking part in protest movements. At the same time, the new media era has acerbated trends that undercut the ideal aims of a democratic press. The media disseminate a tremendous amount of political content, but much of the material is trivial, unreliable, and polarizing. The watchdog role pre-new media had been performed largely by trained journalists who, under the best of circumstances, focused on uncovering the facts surrounding serious political transgressions. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein inspired a generation of investigative journalists after revealing President Richard Nixon’s role in the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, forcing his resignation (Shepard, 2012). Much news in the new media era is defined by coverage of a never-ending barrage of sensational scandals—be they real, exaggerated, or entirely fabricated—that often are only tangentially related to governing. This chapter begins by briefly addressing the evolution of new media in the United States to establish the core characteristics of the current political media system. We then will focus on the role of media in providing information in a democratic polity, and will examine the ways in which new media have impacted this role. The diversity of content disseminated by new media has created opportunities, such as the ability for more voices to be heard.