Media's Coverage of Gay Marriage Issue
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In the 2004 Presidential election, the media played a key role in influencing different ethnic and minority groups. This election, more than perhaps any other in our Nation's history, was decided by specific blocs of voters who were influenced by the media. The Republican and Democratic Parties targeted their media buys extensively at their ethnic and cultural constituencies, resulting in the largest turnout ever numerically and the largest turnout as a percentage of the population in almost fifty years. While the Democrats did a good job of targeting and turning out the ethnicities that they believed to be their core constituencies, namely Black and Hispanic voters, the Republicans ultimately won the election because they were able to leverage certain cultural wedge issues to motivate their core constituencies and pick off some of the Democrats'. The media, with its relentless news cycle and never-ending coverage of the campaign, ultimately acted as an echo chamber for both parties. The election ultimately turned on the subject of gay marriage, and the media's coverage of this subject played a key role in the sweeping Republican victory. First, let us examine the issue of gay marriage. The issue rose to National-level prominence in the past year in the city of San Francisco. In 2000, the state of California passed a referendum, Proposition 22, which defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman. In 2003, the mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsome, flouted the s
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ral "pro-gay marriage" candidate, despite his repeated attempts to distance himself from the issue.
The media was a willing and eager participant in the war over gay marriage that was fought in this election. In the so-called swing states, the media war over same sex marriage was bitter and inescapable. This was partly due to the canny decision by Republican political strategists to field gay-marriage referendums on the ballots of eleven states, including in swing states as Ohio. Having the issue on the ballots in these states not only motivated anti gay-marriage voters to turn out, but it ensured that the issue would receive heavy media attention in those states. This certainly turned out to be the case, and in swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania the media war over gay marriage was widespread. Liberal and Conservative groups spent millions of dollars on media buys. But the larger question concerns what the independent media's influence on the gay-marriage issue has been.
Additionally, many opponents of gay marriage believe and vociferously proclaim that the traditional media has a pro-homosexual bias vis-a-vis this issue. This point of view has been bolstered by the fact that in the last year many newspapers acros
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Approximate Word count = 2010
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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