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The Press: Old and New

Although it has no constitutional function, the press has long had an important role to play in the American system of government. Often called The Fourth Estate, the press (now more often called "the media") is promoted in civics classes and in their own words as conducting a watchdog function over government. The cases of Watergate and Vietnam are often pointed to as examples of the media performing this role, and there are numerous examples of this at the state and local levels. However, this century has witnessed an evolving intimate, even symbiotic, relationship between the media and government, at least at the national level. From the Hearst newspaper chain's active promotion of the Spanish-American War through the often breathless trumpeting of the Gulf War by many major outlets, the large and influential purveyors of the news have come to be seen by many as merely another arm of the Establishment, with serious questioning and investigation of the government in the muckraking tradition carried out by more marginal sources.

In recent years, with the explosion of new communication technologies from the fax machine to the Internet, there are increasing numbers of marginal, or samizdat, news and information sources, as well as increased access to them by the general public. It is the intent of this paper to compare and contrast the coverage of one of these new media outlets to that of a traditional, established source. For the purposes of this research, coverage of a specific topic will be examined, focusing on how that topic is handled in each of the chosen publications. The topic will be the ongoing sex, perjury, and obstruction of justice scandal surrounding President Clinton. The traditional publication to be analyzed will be Newsweek magazine, which broke the Monica Lewinsky story (although the Internet-based Drudge Report pirated parts of their story and published it 48 hours before the magazine) and continues to ...

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The Press: Old and New. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 02:40, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1688003.html