Week 10 – Media in Politics

It was an interesting chapter to read because media plays a vital role in politics. The term ‘agenda setting’ as Cohen (1963) wrote, “The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about” This is a strong factor in media that maybe we don’t notice but are exposed to on a daily basis. Media creates a narrative for the public and we, as public, somehow live that narrative.

I was interested to learn new terms like gatekeeping, coverage bias, statement bias etc. which I can relate to my own Pakistani media and politics. For example, coverage bias is very common in Pakistani media as there are some specific news channels that focus on the news of only one political party.

Moving on, if I think about the effect of social media in favor of political leaders in terms of my own country Pakistan again. A very prominent leader of our country Imran Khan was arrested before the national elections of Pakistan and his political party was dissolved. This information was not being covered by the news – print and electronic. Meanwhile, the political party members were able to communicate with their followers through social media and in this case, social media played a prominent role to convey the news.

In addition, I would like to mention the role of emotions in political decision making as we have discussed in the previous weeks. Hedonic Contingency Model suggests that if an individual is in a sad mood, he will pay less attention to information and if an individual is in a happy mood, he will pay more attention to information. This information can be added to the fact that some people might be interested in politics while others might not be interested. So, I can somewhat conclude that if a person is interested in politics and is hopeful, he will pay more attention to information and if a person is not interested in politics and he is hopeless about politics, he will pay least attention to political information. However, if we remember from last week’s chapter, even if a person is interested in politics, they fall into the trap of heuristics.