American Media and Politics

The democracy that our country has come to know and love has its foundation in our media. It is an important tool in our society, almost a fourth branch of our government. With it comes transparency, accountability, discussion, education, and freedom. Although our media has grown over the years into what we see as an destructive establishment, without it, we are nothing. We as Americans recognize the problems of our media today, and what comes as a surprise to many people, it doesn’t influence our ideology, it brings about information to prove or disprove our beliefs, it brings about greater voter turnout, and brings about greater democracy. We tend to see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear. Our values and ideologies remain strong, uninfluenced by our ever growing commercial media. There is a reason why the founding fathers included freedom of the press in our constitution. A democracy cannot survive without an establishment that is used to keep it in check; democracy without a media is a dictatorship. Simply put, “where it up to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter,” Thomas Jefferson.