Social media has often been the topics of my editorials, essays, and engagements. How could it not be, since Wi-Fi has become a public good internationally accessible and user-friendly “create an account” tabs have absolutely democratized public platforms? Just like print media and television before it, the medium has revolutionized the ways in which we brand ourselves, interact with one another, and participate in the public sphere.

The 2016 presidential election is proof of such: politicians (looking at you, @realDonaldTrump… or @POTUS) have utilized digital soapboxes as a means of broadcasting their policies and interacting directly with both the press and constituents. Voters have taken to social media to – attempt – to create political discourses with their friends and followers, generally by either airing their grievances with some officials or attempting to rally support for their candidates of choice. The press has both broken political news and circulated political analysis.

While the “media” (print, digital, and social) has been acclaimed for its role in a modern democracy as both a messenger and watchdog that inform viewers and hold elected officials accountable to them, respectively, the greater consequences have yet to be realized. In 2011, for the first time in a Pew Research Center survey, as many respondents answered that news organizations hurt democracy (42%) as protect democracy (42%). Not only have media consolidation tainted the integrity of the media and cross-brand competition bred inaccurate sensationalism of the news, but each mode of communication in a consumer-driven society has driven our society towards “selective exposure,” thereby thwarting the marketplace of ideas on which America’s political system was built.

Although traditional print media has continued to be supplanted by the advent of digital platforms, too great of a trust in newspapers threatens readers’ independent abilities to make judgments and draw conclusions on that which is relayed via print. Both a paper’s format and headline threaten to mislead voters.

In a Student News Daily excerpt of Brent H. Baker's "How to Identify Liberal Media Bias"" “bias by placement” is introduced as important evidence of corporate political prejudice in print media. Baker writes, “Story placement is a measure of how important the editor considers the story.” Studies have shown that the average newspaper reader only reads the headline; consequently, a particular news outlet may specifically run information supportive of one ideological perspective or another on the cover page of a print publication. This is similar to the way in which television and radio newscasts run the most important – or self-incriminating – stories first and leave those deemed less important to later. Case in point, a story’s physical placement may unfairly sway a reader’s perception of a report’s importance.

Likewise, “bias by placement” may manifest itself in where information appears within an article. Burying material at the end of a text may effectively downplay, if not hide, a particular point of view or persuasive piece of information, whereas introducing such at an article’s commencement may do the opposite. Baker writes, “In a fair and balanced story, the reporter would quote or summarize the liberal and conservative view at about the same place in the story.”

Because few readers stray beyond a headline or cover story, as previously noted, traditional media outlets face the challenge of printing news that both attracts (*costs) and engages consumers. For this reason, newspapers frequently give greater priority to political scandals – the blatant breaches of the social nuances that both bind and guide us together as a collective, civil society whilst concurrently piquing our deviant interests – than actual platforms. The odds are slim-to-none that consumers would have spent $2.50 on a Saturday copy of the New York Times last September, nevertheless seeking yet another editorial endorsing Hillary Clinton in 2016, had “The Bitch America Needs” not been printed in rich, black ink across the cover of the Opinion page. Relating back to bias by placement, newspaper articles on the most widely read pages, including the front and editorial pages, have the greatest influence on public opinion; hence, the NYT may very well have been expressed its corporate pro-Clinton position. This trend drove both the general election and presidential debates, mudslinging became more prevalent amongst candidates than actual policy debates. Clinton and Trump regularly focused more often one another’s e-mail and audio tape scandals, respectively, than their oppositional economic platforms. Of course, this is a common failure shared by all media platforms (to be addressed at length during a discourse on media corruption in political coverage on television).

Scandal aside, due to the fact that the average newsprint consumer rarely divagates past the front page, the title of any written piece has the power to sway readers’ opinions one way or another. Maria Konnikova, in "How Headlines Change The Way We Think”, explains, “Everyone knows that a headline determines how many people will read a piece… But, more interesting, a headline changes the way people read an article and the way they remember it.” Just as first impressions render the greatest impact on interpersonal interactions, “the crafting of the headline can subtly shift the perception of the text that follows.” Certain diction or an emphasis upon particular facts can bear the propensity to influence a reader’s mindset so that he or she may later recall details that specifically coincide with expectations formed by the headline. Konnikova elaborates, “As a result of these shifts in perception, problems arise when a headline is ever so slightly misleading.” Such impairs a reader’s ability to make accurate, fair inferences. This is a particularly pertinent issue when headlines, which are usually not written by the reporter, contradict their corresponding stories. Most famously, a New York Times (NYT) article documenting the June, 1988, U.S.-U.S.S.R. summit in Moscow boasted the title, "Thatcher Salute To The Reagan Years”. In the body of the text, Margaret Thatcher was quoted as saying of then-president Ronald Regan, “Poor dear, there’s nothing between his ears.”

However, digital media – namely television – is really no better than newsprint at ensuring democratic civic participation in the political realm. If anything, it, too, has corrupted America’s representative structure due to the consolidation of major networks and evolution of honest reporting into “infotainment.”

Media consolidation, a process whereby progressively fewer individuals control increasing shares of the mass media, has become a growing threat to democracy. Viewers have become increasingly skeptical of the information fed to them by corporate media giants who host politicians in the depths of their pockets. Gemini Fox elaborates in “10+ Independent Online News Sources and Why America Needs More of Them.” She writes, “In 1983, 90% of our media was owned and controlled by 50 different companies. Today, 90% of our news… is dominated by six media giants.” The “Big Six,” as they’re known, include CBS Corporation, Comcast, News Corporation, Time Warner, Viacom, and the Walt Disney Company.

In 1934, the Communications Act established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an independent government agency composed of five people tasked with implementing media policy and law. The FCC was intended to regulate interstate and international communications throughout the United States. The first reform to the Communications Act did not come until 1996, when then-president Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunication Act of 1996 into law. The legislation both reduced FCC regulations on cross-ownership and allowed corporations to increase their monopolies upon the national flow of information by buying up thousands of smaller media outlets across the country.

The concentration of such media corporations has funneled paychecks spanning multiple zeroes into the wallets of such corporations’ leaders, which have then turned this money into extensive lobbying and campaign donation funds. In “Is America an Oligarchy?” John Cassidy unpacks the consequences of this money flow, citing the conclusions of political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page from a 2014 study. They write, “But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.” When the wealthy support a given policy change, it has a one-in-two chance of being enacted; when the wealthy oppose a given policy change, it has a one-in-five chance of being enacted. It seems natural that the “economic elite domination” would reach to include media giants such as those in the Big Six, who also bear to power to dictate what is newsworthy in front of the eyes of voters.

Yet another repercussion of media consolidation is increased partisanship in the media. The aforementioned chances of legislation going into law depending upon the economic elite is inconsistent with the median-voter theorem, which reasons that policy outcomes reflect the preferences of voters who represent the ideological center. When lobbyists and interest groups with greater resources play their hands in the policymaking arena, a system of winners and losers develops, with better-supplied parties triumphing. When a party claims media influence, it advocates for increasingly polarizing legislation on issues proven to be salient by the amount of news coverage determined by which stories are run and in which tone they are broadcast.

Stemming from televised news networks’ needs to draw in viewers to further their influences is “infotainment,” the sensationalization of political news, to entertain consumers, thereby bolstering viewership. Elaborating upon the democratically and economically deleterious effects of the Big Six, Fox writes, “News is no longer a public service meant to communicate facts but a means for these companies to make profits from entertaining viewers.” The importance of a political event is no longer determined by what is in the public’s best interest, but what attracts the most viewers. The greater the number of viewers, the greater the profits.

Dan Evon reveals the numerous ties between the federal government and digital media in “The Rig Is Up”, a 2016 piece documenting the history of several key associations between the mainstream news media and players in the Obama administration. For example, Susan Rice, National Security Adviser and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, wed Ian Cameron, ABC News executive producer, in 1992; although Rice is still in her said position, Cameron resigned from his position in 2010. Relevant to journalistic-political bonds during the Obama administration, however, was the relationship of David Rhodes, CBS President since 2011, to his brother, Ben Rhodes, the Obama administration’s Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications. Also relevant was the brother-sister relationship shared by the President of Disney-ABC Television Group and Co-Chairman of Disney Media Networks, Ben Sherwood, and Elizabeth Sherwood, the then-U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy under the Obama administration.

The great push for viewership amongst televised news providers is, of course, no new objective. In “The Politics of the Source: How the Credibility of a News Source Changes Based on the Political Perception of Blogs”, Philip J. Auter and Joshua C. Murphycite studies that indicate a significant drop in nightly news viewership: whereas 72% of the overall evening television audience watched the nightly news in the early 1980s, only 29% of the same audience watches such in 2008. In order to gain viewership, networks have sensationalized news stories to highlight an entertainment value that attracts consumers.

Naturally, infotainment demands that which makes headlines, as previously noted: scandal. Since the advent of television in the 1960s elections, the line between “politician” and “celebrity” has blurred. Think of John F. Kennedy: in September, 1960, in the first televised presidential debate in which JFK countered Republican candidate Richard Nixon, JFK easily won over the national electorate with the robustness and confidence he displayed in contrast to Nixon’s constant nervousness. That said, when a politician breaks with tradition, it’s big news – bigger, in fact, than policy coverage. A study conducted at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. Thomas E. Patterson describes such in “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters”. Patterson presents a pie chart of the subjects of news reports in which controversies amount to 17% of total news coverage in the election cycle. Policy stands amount only to 10%. About this shortage, he writes, “Policies lack the novelty that journalists seek in their stories. A new development may thrust a new issue into the campaign, but policy problems are typically longstanding.” In plain English, journalism boasts an inherent bias toward the new. The reason that Trump received 15% more coverage than Clinton did, then, must be due to the way in which the unprecedented (unpresidented?) republican candidate made both himself, and a new controversial post or comment every week (if not day), so easily accessible to the news media.

Evidence of this trend rests in Eric Boehlert’s “Study Confirms Network Evening Newscasts Have Abandoned Policy Coverage for 2016 Campaign". Between 2016’s commencement and the publication of Boehlert’s piece on October 26, 2016, ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News had devoted only 32 minutes – cumulatively – to issues coverage during the 2016 presidential election. Excluded from the breakdown of issues were trade, healthcare, climate change, drugs, poverty, guns, infrastructure, and deficits. Compare this to the 2008 presidential election, in which the network newscasts devoted 220 minutes to issues coverage. Boehlert notes that CBS Evening News went from 119 minutes of issues coverage in 2008 to 16 in 2016. “During the Republican primary season alone, the networks spent 333 minutes focusing on Donald Trump. Yet for all of 2016, they have set aside just one-tenth of that for issue reporting.” Between the three networks, three times as much coverage was spent reporting on Clinton’s e-mail scandal. Part of the purpose of campaign coverage, especially amongst flagship network newscasts, is to help inform voters about key issues of public concern so that they may vote accordingly for elected officials and policies that coincide with such interests. By ignoring these issues in favor of personal controversies, digital media has done the electorate an acute disservice.

With increasingly polarized news networks fighting for a limited quantity of viewers has come the “paid journalist” (if even that), whom has further advocated for a highly polarized perspective while discouraging bipartisan dialogue amongst voters, if not pushing them towards one viewpoint altogether. In "Fox News, A Melodrama”, Emily Nussbaumgives an account of the strict division between “news journalists [who asks follow-up questions and include diverse guests] and pure ideologues [like the mad king [[Sean]] Hannity]” on Fox News. Regardless of however explicitly biased the airtime of such ideologues may seem, though, “as Hannity argues, shows like his pay the bills.” The paid journalist is thereby not a reporter who prides him- or her- self on journalistic integrity, but no better than the talk-show host acclaimed or his or her highly polarized remarks on political occurrences.

When the undecided voter turns to a televised news network for guidance or insight as to campaign rhetoric, he or she is often met with, as aforementioned, the storied talk-show host. Auter explains, “Talk-show hosts often provide analysis on issues while emitting an air of political expertise on television. They provide opinion-based analysis of political events and usually have, and in fact, often tout their political preference.” These hosts are not traditional journalists in that they do not break the news; rather, they offer highly biased commentary on news which has already been broken. The shows in which they star have enabled analysts – and TV personalities – to propagate specific political perspectives on behalf of the networks that broadcast the bits. Ergo, Auter writes, “These shows are unique in that the host often makes no attempt to hide his or her own political opinions and, in fact, cater to those with similar beliefs.” The nature of competition amongst cable news networks has, consequently, led to a lack of opinion diversity amongst shows of similar formats, creating a “bi-modal monolith of cable television punditry where issues are vetted by analysts who stick to the Democratic or Republican party lines.” Rather than offering viewers a dynamic understanding of the political issues that elicit media attention, with which eligible voters may draw their own opinions and cast their ballots accordingly, these shows exacerbate an increasingly polarized political climate in which policymaking stalemates overshadow productive resolutions.

If the prototypical Facebook or Twitter user has access to this vast variety of sources, though, independent of biased format and viewer manipulation, in what ways does social media threaten the very democratic principles on which Americans pride themselves? As it would turn out, social media users are consistently less informed due to the fallacy of “selective exposure.” However, this is not the fault of the great, elusive “media” – it’s the user’s.

A 2014 report by Monica Anderson and Andrea Caumont, “How Social Media is Reshaping News”, unpacks the indirect relationship in which news readership decreases as social media usage increases. A 2013 study conducted by the Pew Research Center reveals that roughly two-thirds, or 64%, of United States adults use Facebook; half of these users, or 30% of the general adult population, get their news from the social media platform. Anderson and Caumont write, “Facebook is an important source of website referrals for many news outlets, but the users who arrive via Facebook spend less time and consume far fewer pages than those who arrive directly [and via search].” Their analysis of comScore data found that visitors who go directly to a news website, rather than via clicking a Facebook link or a result from Google search, spend three times as much time on the site and consume five times as many pages a month. These numbers indicate that dependence upon social media has effectively corroded Americans’ understanding of current events, thereby threatening their political understanding in the election cycle.

Further curtailing social media users’ degree of political knowledge is the usage of online platforms as entertainment portals. The replacement of news homepages with platform profiles has diluted the news. “Evergreen” stories – including exercise tips and dieting trends – have replaced breaking news on many a News Feed. What political reports do attract attention on social media streams are, like those propagated by print and televised news, driven by scandal. In “Did Social Media Ruin Election 2016?” Sam Sanders shares statistics from Talkwalker, a social media analytics company, which found the top three political themes across social media platforms in 2016 included Trump’s comments about women, Clinton’s ongoing email scandal, and Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns.

Because social media empowers users with the authority to curate their feeds, such platforms often tailor content to pre-conceived personal preferences. Chanelle Ignant provides a discourse on these network trends in“How Does Social Media Shape Our Political Views?” She explains that predominant social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are popular because they speak to what users already like, writing, “Our social media feeds aren’t about helping us explore new things. They’re about creating a comfortable place to hang out.” Ignant quotes Juana Summers, an editor for CNN Politics: “[Social media is] kind of a marketplace for ideas.” However, by limiting News Feeds to content with which users already agree via an intricate algorithm that accounts for previously likes and behaviors, or “narrow-casting,” social media refutes the democratic principle that all voices can be heard. “Instead of embracing a vibrant public conversation, we end up in an online echo chamber.”

The failure of this “online echo chamber” is its inability to facilitate a bipartisan, politically involved, productive dialogue amongst members of the electorate. In “Social Media and the ‘Spiral of Silence”, Maria Dwyer, et. al., explore social media users’ tendency to not speak up about policy issues in public – or in an online public forum like the ones provided by social media – when they believe their own point of viewpoint is not widely shared. To do so, Dwyer and her colleagues collected data from a study of 1,801 adults focusing on Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations of widespread government surveillance of Americans’ phone and email records. They found that not only were people less willing to discuss the political scandal in social media than they were in person, but that Facebook and Twitter users were less likely to share their opinions in many face-to-face settings, thus indicating that social media dependency bore a correlation to decreased political rhetoric. However, although social media was conceptualized in hopes of democratizing discussion venues and broaden public discourse, in both personal and online settings, people were more willing to share their views if they thought their audience agreed with them.

Perhaps this phenomenon is due to what Sanders refers to as the intrinsically compromising format of social networks. For instance, Twitter does not facilitate conversation via threads of messages spanning only 140 characters, but a “loud mess.” Sanders himself attests to unfriending those on Facebook with whom he did not agree, thereby restricting his sphere of socialization to one of reinforcement, and publicly shaming Twitter followers who oppose the political content which he shared. Whereas consistent conservatives are most, or 66%, likely to have friends who shared their own political views, consistent liberals are the most likely ideological group to block or de-friend someone on a social network because of politics. Argumentative, combative outbursts have replaced thoughtful, intellectual conversations; even politicians have appropriated the language of social media and mastered the social currency of such (including the snark and rapid-fire exchanges). Moreover, Sanders found that “one-third of pro-Trump tweets and nearly one-fifth of pro-Clinton tweets came from automated accounts” programmed to align themselves with agendas explicitly biased towards one political party or another, serving only to bolster an already-polarized political atmosphere.

Although, of course, social media makes it all too easy to subscribe exclusively to content slanted towards a user’s personal views, the threat this poses to the democratic process on which America prides itself is grave. In “All the News You Want to Hear: The Impact of Partisan News Exposure on Political Participation”, Susanna Dilliplane writes, “This development poses a challenge to ideals of deliberative democracy if people who consume politically likeminded news disproportionately populate the electoral process, while those presumably reaping the benefits of exposure to more diverse views in the news withdraw from politics.” Such a situation mimics the failure of the median-voter theorem due to media consolidation. Dilliplane finds that consistent exposure to partisan news both increases partisanship, or polarization, and increases participation in the political process, thereby both tipping the electoral scale towards legislation pushed by either end of the ideological spectrum and dashing any hopes for collaborative, moderate compromise.

All-in-all, a democracy cannot function without the freedom of the press, as protected by the First Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights, in print, digital, and social media. In "Wikileaks Reveals Mainstream Media’s Coziness with Clinton”, Michael Sainatonotes the mainstream media’s responsibility that serves to inform voters to enrich democracy. The political system upon on which American government is built heralds a marketplace of ideas in which the electorate has the obligation to hear, and responsibility to decide upon, the ideas which are most beneficial to the greatest concentration of the citizens which the government oversees. If nothing else, the 2016 presidential election cycle illuminated the importance of objectivity and balance from the mainstream press, which it lacked across every news medium. Instead, the media has developed a feedback loop between support for particular candidates and their political agendas, pressured by corporate finances and cushioned by highly polarized consumers. The impetus upon the electorate must be to actively participate in and question the news media in order to cultivate and substantiate the ideas by which it stands moving forwards.