Politics and the Media

Most Americans gets their information about election campaigns through the news media (Froomkin 1). Consequently, the news media play an important part how Americans form their views of politics. Traditionally, the news media and the American people believed that the news reporter's role was to report the news and to offer contextual analysis of the news to help the viewer understand the relative significance of the events reported (Froomkin 1). An important part of this role included questioning the people who were making the news about statements and political positions they had adopted. This role also required that news reporters conduct follow-up investigations and fact-checks to verify the information given to them by the newsmakers. More recently, however, the news media have begun to operate more like arms of political operations rather than independent news sources. The ultimate result is that viewers have lost trust in the news media and no longer expect independent reporting from their media sources.

During and after the 2004 presidential election, many American journalists came to believe that the American media was no longer fulfilling their traditional roles as independent voices who acted in the country's public interest. In fact, Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post argued that after the 2004 presidential election "the impartial, unemotional postwar model of mainstream journalism simply may not be up to covering the current political cli

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