Media's Responsibility In Presidential Elections

Elections are no longer based on policy or a candidate's opinions - a recent study found that many voters were more concerned about a presidential candidate's appearance than what they planned to do in office. As a result of America's dependence on media outlets for information, more citizens are voting based on misinformation and ignorance. The number of American citizens that vote in presidential elections has been declining at an alarming rate over the last 30 years, and with more media and information sources being bought out; Americans have been taught not to care about their government as much anymore, and those that do, are often fed biased or false information. Popular news networks like the New York Times or CNN are no longer visible
Over an extended period of time, many media outlets have been bought out by corporations seeking to sway public opinion in their favor. According to the Corporate Accountability Project (CAP), the number of major corporations that controlled US media outlets since 1983, has shrunk significantly from a total of fifty corporations, to a small group of just five. While control of the media outlets was previously distributed to a wide range of controllers, it has now fallen into the hands of a few (Watts). Mega corporations such as Time Warner, Comcast, Newsgroup, and Viacom control the largest of the media outlets, and can utilize them to promote political and legal concepts and ideologies - such as support for a new political candidate. An example of this would be CNN, owned by Time Warner. According to the Federal Election Commission, Time Warner donated over half a million dollars to fund the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. After making this donation, many CNN news stories and interviews contained obvious bias in favor of the candidate. By allowing corporations to purchase news outlets, American privatized media will likely never be 100% balanced in it’s interpretation and presentation of