Impact of Television on Presidential Elections
Impact of Television on Presidential Elections The Impact of Television on Presidential Elections: The aim of this paper is to look at the relationship between the mass media, specifically television, and presidential elections. This paper will focus on the function of television in presidential elections through three main areas: exit polls, presidential debates, and spots. The focus is on television for three reasons. First, television reaches more voters than any other medium. Second, television attracts the greatest part of presidential campaign budgets. Third, television provides the candidates a good opportunity to contact the people directly. A second main theme of this paper is the role of television in presidential elections in terms of representative democracy in the United States. Researchers tend to hold one of three views about television 's influence on voters. Some believe that television affects voters in the short run, for example in an election campaign. Another group of researchers believes that television has a great influence on voters over time and that television 's impact on voters is a continuous process from one campaign to the next. Others stand between the two views or combine both. In the last three decades, polls became an important instrument for the media, especially television networks, to determine who wins and who loses the election. Caprini conducted a study about the impact of the early prediction of a winner in the 1980 presidential race by the television networks. He observed that, shortly after 8 p.m. Eastern standard time, NBC announced that, according to its analysis of exit poll data, Ronald Reagan was to be the next president of the United States (Caprini, 1984, p. 866). That early call was controversial because the polls in many states were still open at the time and, in some of the western states, would remain open for several hours. Caprini ended his study with the following conclusion:
References: Abrams, Floyd. (1985, Spring). Press practices, polling restrictions, public opinion and first amendment guarantees. Public Opinion Quarterly 49 (1): pp. 15-18. Caprini, Michael X. Delli. (1984, August). Scooping the voters? The consequences of the networks ' early call of the 1980 Presidential race. Journal of Politics 46: pp. 866-85. Diamond, Edwin, and Stephen Bates. (1984). The Spot. Massachusetts: MIT Press. Epstein, Laurily R., and Gerald Strorn. (October 1981). Election night projections and west coast turn out. American Politics Quarterly 9 (4): pp. 479-91. Greenberg, S. Edward. (1986). The American political system: A radical approach. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Hess, Stephen. (1988). The Presidential campaign. Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institute. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. (1984). Packaging the Presidency: A history and criticism of Presidential campaign advertising. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katz, Elihu, and Jacob J. Feldman. (1962). The debates in the light of research: A survey of surveys. In The Great Debates, ed. Sidney Kraus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 173-223. Kraus, Sidney. (1988). Televised Presidential debates, and public policy. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Lowi, Theodore J. (1985). The personal President: Power invested promise unfulfilled. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Mcginniss, Joe. (1969). The selling of the President 1968. New York: Trident Press. Mickelson, Sig. (1989). From whistle stop to sound bite: Four decades of politics and television. New York: Praeger. Wattenberg, Martin P. (1986). The decline of American political parties 1952-1984. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.