is being manipulated and appealed to through advertising. It is less clear if the public understands how the parties and candidates make use of television news. Americans today have a wide variety of news outlets from which they can gather their news, including newspapers, publications, books, broadcast television stations, radio stations, the Internet, and cable. On cable and the Internet there are 24-hour news outlets such as CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and C-Span. Critics, however, ask whether the citizen is any better informed in spite of (or because of) all this choice. Critics further charge that "many citizens--perhaps the majority--live in a state of confusion and ignorance about government and political issues" (Bennett 1).
Leaders of the political parties in and out of government know the value of the news and have developed many ways of manipulating the way they are covered, an issue that surfaces from time to time when the news media begins to resent being manipulated or somehow has a particular
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