Camp Wahanowin

1. Timothy Cook writes, “Given the tendency for the news media to craft stories around individuals rather than social forces, the president is the most familiar protagonist around.” How do American Presidents attempt to shape their policies and their image with respect to communicating with the public (think about agenda setting, priming and framing as well as the tools/techniques the President employs to try and control the media). What role does the news media play in this process? What are the implications for the creation of public policy and the future of American democracy?

According to the President Abraham Lincoln, public sentiment is everything that presidents need. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Thus, President and the administration use media to make favorable and supportive public opinion. Why they use media? That is because the functions of the media such as agenda setting, priming and framing. Media can influence what issues public should pay attention to. Agenda setting is the process by which the media communicate the relative importance of issues to the public. Priming is how the media highlight issues which can lead public to make judgments about politicians and policies. What aspects the media draw is really important, since it can change the criteria which are used to evaluate politicians and policies. Framing is focusing on how the issue is organized and developed rather than how media selected the issues or what issues are important. Framing implies how to think or interpret about the political issues. Framing can be done by manipulating names, metaphors, symbols, and language (words.) Framing can favor a particular side in an argument without showing different sides.
The White House office of communication, the press secretary, and the White House Press Corps are offices that help Presidents try to win favorable support, shape news flow, and orchestrate coverage. Presidents have the White House office of communication to get some communication consulting. It functions as PR firms of the White House, so it provides speech writing, controls all media appearances, and so on. It helps creating messages which can make favorable public sentiment. Presidents also have the press secretary. The press secretary helps Presidents connect with the Press. It interacts daily with the White House Press Corps. The White House Press Corps is where the most major news related to White House comes from. Presidents want to shape and manage the presidential news flow. Press releases and news briefings deal with a specific topic and are more frequent. These may cover breaking information or updates and generally less formal. News conferences works little different. They deal with multiple topics and have a specific play book – an entrance, prepared remarks, and questions from the press. They are more formal than press releases and news briefings and are announced will in advance. Sometimes, presidents go directly to the public. Roosevelt’s fireside chat, weekly video address, or giving a speech can be great examples of this.
Presidents also care about information leaks. Especially animus leak and whistle blowers’ leak can be fatal to their policies and their image. In order to create favorable public opinion, Presidents have to pay attention to information leaks. Images are another important source to determine public opinion. Images can be extremely powerful when it comes to forming the perception of the Presidents. So, presidents are terribly careful about what images are released to the public. In order to control the images, there is official White House photographer who is specifically assigned to document the presidency.
When political event happens, Presidents and the administration try to place administration officials in front or top of the story to establish frames before someone else does this. News media plays important role during this process. Media write many articles about what public should pay attention to. Media shows what Presidents want to say to the public and how the public evaluate. Also, media framed how to think and interpret the event based on Presidents side. When the public read the articles, they probably know what the important political agenda are, what things they should think about, based on what they should evaluate, and how they think about this. So, media can help the public have similar opinion about the political event by framing. Consequently, this similar thinks and opinions form public opinion.
Public policy is the principled guide to action taken by the administrative executive branches of the state with regard to a class of issues in a manner consistent with law and institutional customs. In general, the foundation is the pertinent national and substantial constitutional law and implementing legislation. Policy is the decision made by political process in order to solve the problem. It has a legal power to obligate the public. Public policies deal with a variety of field such as economy, education, welfare and so on. Thus, Implications for the creation of public policy have enormous effect on all around the society. For example, President Obama tries to enforce immigration reform in 2013. If this public policy is settled, it probably causes consecutive changes. For illegal immigrants, they get a path to an American citizenship. They no longer work under discriminatory condition. However, their employers should pay more money. This also affects America’s economy and security. Government tries to enlarge job opportunity, since a lot of Hispanic workers need to get a job. However, a rush from Mexico without permission is probably happens in order to get American citizenship. In addition, it is going to have great impact on America democracy. Democrats are supporting this immigration reform, but a lot of Republicans still worry about the border security. So, they are skeptical to immigration reform. Because of this, Republicans loss their Hispanic voters even if it is not yet implemented. A myriad of Hispanic voters are supporting Democrats and it makes difference in 2012 election. Eventually, implications for the creation of public policy are going to affect all over the country.

2. Robert Putnam writes, “The closing decades of the twentieth century found Americans growing ever less connected with one another and with collective life. We voted less, joined less, gave less, trusted less, invested less time in public affairs, and engaged less with our friends, our neighbors and even our families. Our “we” steadily shriveled.” During the course of the quarter, we have discussed a wide range of issues and trends with respect to the structure, roles, and modes of the media within the political process. What is the connection between these trends and issues to the concern that Putnam raises with the decline of civic engagement and social capital? How have these trends in the media interacted with the dominant trends in American politics to further contribute to the decline of social capital and civic engagement? In other words, (1) how does what we read and what we see, and how it is delivered to us through the mass media contribute to making us less and less connected to the political process and each other, (2) what are the explanations for the changes in what we read and what we see and (3) what implications do these have for the future of American democracy?

Robert Putnam worried that America’s social capital is declining. Social capital refers to connections among individuals - social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them, whereas physical capital refers to physical objects and human capital refers to the property of individuals. That is, social capital means features of social organization such as networks, norms and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit. He also pointed out that civic engagement is shrinking. Civic engagement is related to voting, political participation, newspaper readership, and participation in local associations that there were serious grounds for concern. The closing decades of the twentieth century found Americans growing ever less connected with one another and with collective life. We voted less, joined less, gave less, trusted less, invested less time in public affairs, and engaged less with our friends, our neighbors, and even our families. Our “we” steadily shrived. This change happens because of a myriad of reasons. The changing workplace, the changing family structure, age, suburban life, TV, computers, and women’s role can be the reasons. Some people are working alone and one person family become common. Young people usually have less interest in public events and it becomes common that you don’t know who lives next door. After TV spread, the most common scene is that people just sit on the couch and watch soap operas, TV shows, or sports games. People do not socialize themselves. They are losing social capital. Computer makes people more isolated. We can get whatever we want through the internet. Now we don’t have to see the people to buy stuffs. We just click and buy items through online and it is delivered right to our places. These circumstances are related to structures and trends of the media within the political process. In the past, we read, we see, and we can get unbiased information delivered by the media. Even if the number of media or sources is less than present, we can easily understand the argument and figure out both sides. In addition, most of information is related to its civil society and public things. However, media structure has changed. Structure change is characterized by following five words: Concentration, Conglomeration, Globalization, Homogenization, and Trivialization.
Concentration means media is increasingly fewer individuals or organizations control an increasing share of a particular medium. The consolidation of ownership happens. Thus, it is hard to guarantee diversity of idea. It is natural that articles from same company have similar information. Conglomeration is the process by which difference forms of media are joined together into one corporation. Because of this, media monopoly occurs. It also disrupts diversity of opinion. Globalization means company is getting world-wide in geographical and cultural aspects. Homogenization refers to spread of media conglomerates to new areas of social life. Because of these two trends, now we receive almost same information from different media. For example, information is almost same from TV, radio or internet if those media’s ownership is same. Trivialization refers to increasingly subordinate editorial fare to commercial value and logic. In the past, most information was mainly about overall society such as economy, politic, or society. However, sports, entertainment, or sex is mainly consumed subject news recently. There is almost no news about “we” or our society. The news materials become trivialized. Nowadays, for instance, the number of entertainment news, sports news or TV shows is much larger than the number of hard news. To make matters worse, people are not interested in hard news. Civic engagement is too low. Further, media has no ability to provide neutral and unbiased information. As you may know, media companies mediated the reality based on its perspective. Media is not a neutral news maker but a manufacture of consent. If you spend only one media, you cannot know about the whole reality, since your knowledge is based only on the information provided by the media. Because of these trends, it is really hard to get information about our society even if we have interest in our society. Under this circumstance, what we read and what we see, and how it is delivered to us through the mass media is either so trivialized or so biased. In addition, people lack of community spirit. They are generally individualistic and don’t care about their society.
This indifference can be a big problem in future of American democracy. First of all, it can’t be called as democracy since it can’t reflect the public opinion. Democracy can’t run within only a few people. Everyone’s participation is mandatory. Thus, it could cause the crisis of democracy in the future. Next, society is going excessive entertainment. People are enthusiastic about entertainment things. People just consume unhealthy consumerism. People lose to think critically. They just adapt what media gives to them. People don’t care about public interest or public events. They only care their own interest and don’t forgive their right for the civic virtue. Third, this indifference provides politicians opportunity to manipulate its country. If you are a politician or elite, it is best condition to manipulate because people are indifferent about public event and they even don’t think critically. In addition, they don’t blame for not providing information about public events. They are going to feel so happy if media provides a lot of entertainments. This could be the one of the worst things that you could imagine. Thus, people should recover civic engagement first, and try to think of its society. People should increase social capital. Think civic virtue first to live better life. In addition to this, think critically and don’t adapt everything from the media that you spend. If you don’t think critically, media companies or politicians try to manipulate the public. Also, media companies should try to provide unbiased and neutral information to the public. If these things possible, the future of American democracy goes well.