How has media changed political campaigns? What are the positives / negatives?
Throughout the years, political campaigns changed greatly. In today’s world many Americans use the cell phone more than anything else throughout the entire day. Back in the days when you would want to hear about politics, it would result to you using the old newspapers, radio, or television. In today’s generation, everyone has social media, and less people own cable boxes for television and just rely on the internet. If you compare 2010s use of the cell phone to track political news or campaign coverage to 2014, it was more than doubles, and that was only a 4 year difference. Compare 2014 to the present time (2019) and i guarantee that the use of tracking political news from cell phones would have been tripled from that of 2014. “ As smartphone ownership has increased dramatically in recent years, more and more Americans are using their mobile devices to keep tabs on political events. Some 28% of registered voters have used their cell phone this year to keep up with news relating to the election or political events, which represents a two-fold increase compared with the most recent midterm election cycle. In a survey conducted at the end of the 2010 election campaign, just 13% of registered voters said that they had used their cell phones to keep up with election coverage.” (quote from Cell Phones, Social Media and Campaign 2014). When we talk about media and how it can be positive, we can look at how Donald Trump mastered the use of twitter to get the most engagement that was a main reason why he became president.You can say that this is a positive method because of the amount of people that can see quick news in a matter of seconds. You wouldn’t have to wait for things to be broadcast and processed on tv which can cause delays. Thoughts and opinions can be shared as soon as it comes to mind. For example, Donald trump’s last tweet was 4 hours ago which has gotten 44.6k likes shared from 11.5k people. The negatives about this is that what is said on social media that can be false, to opinionated, or distracting. Donald Trump same tweet in my opinion seemed compulsive and not necessary to say in this manner “ Remember this, Andrew McCabe didn’t go to the bathroom without the approval of Leakin’ James Comey!”. This can be negative because of the unnecessary drama it could cause and the fact that it can take away from important politics.