This November 4th our country watched as Barack Obama became our nations new president elect. Nearly every one saw this of course by watching some media news network and like wise, almost every person who voted based their decision on information they got from some media coverage. In a perfect world the media wouldn't have any influence of who wins an election. It would simply show each candidates points of view and ideas of how the country would be led. However, this is not a perfect world, it is far from it. So what role did the media have in deciding the outcome of the votes? Well stats show that a far greater percentage of media coverage was negative towards McCain. As well, much more of the coverage was positive towards Obama. So does this mean that since the new stations apparently talked about Obama more favorably than McCain that they are the reason why Obama won? I personally personally don't think so.
I feel that the reason why McCain lost is because he didn't have as good of a campaign strategy as Obama's. A lot of this that McCain did and talked about were not received very well by the public. This simply made it easier for the media to pick on McCain. I think the worst idea that McCain's campaign had was to have Sarah Palin as his running mate. I'm not saying she was unintelligent or would have been a bad Vice President, those ideas don't even matter. The problem with her was that she became an all too easy target for the media, and not in a good way. Any one has to admit that the idea of an extremely attractive young woman from Alaska being the Vice President of a very old man has some humor to it and is hard to take seriously. And with out looking any deeper into Governor Palin's actual political history that is all that people see. It also doesn't help when she would crack under pressure from the media, although i think most people would if they had to take the abuse she did.
What I am basically saying is that its not really the medias fault that they were so negative to McCain. Maybe they did take things a bit too far some times, but when you are running a political campaign you have to anticipate the medias reaction and plan your strategy around that.
1 comment:
I completely agree with your point about the media being negative on McCain. I knew that after the primaries it was going to be hard for McCain. The path was not going to be easy. Obama made it clear from the beginning that McCain supported some issues that President Bush did and that definately hurt McCain. As far as electing Sarah Palin as his running mate, I sort of disagree. I think he made a good choice and I believe she is very intelligent. However, I can see your point about being a target for the media. I agree with you that Obama had a better campaign, the results show it. As far as the media not being so negative on Obama, I don't think people even noticed. I think people are looking for a change and hopefully we can change!
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