Quiz 3: Essay You Might Want To Emulate

Public opinion, in relation to politics, can be loosely defined as the commonly held beliefs or ideas of the people in regards to a specific public policy, politician, political party, political ideology, or government act. While public opinion has always been a concern for all political systems, as failure to take public opinion into consideration has often led to the downfall of a regime; it is a fundamentally consideration of a democratic political system, such as the United States, where political authority is based on the will and blessing of the masses. In the US, public opinion about politics is generally obtained and developed in four ways, namely, from a political candidate directly, from a public interest group or political party, from family or friends, and lastly, from the media. Within these four categories, family and friends, and the media, are perhaps the most common means that people development their opinions about politics. In other words, the most common sources of political socialization are derived from who your friends and family are and what you hear in the news. Naturally, self-interest also plays an enormous role in determining one’s political views This is so because at its core, politics is an intensely personal endeavor. Accordingly, on the one hand, people are influenced by the ideas of others such as family. On the other hand, those outside influences are processed through one’s own self-interest. The result of the interaction between those two forces results in one’s opinion about politics. For example, a person might be attracted to a politician because s/he shares is the same race, ethnicity, social class or education as the individual. Perhaps, they grew up with the person or knew the person’s parents. People on knows says s/he is a good person. In such as case, the possibility that the influence of others will likely lead to a wanting to see “one of their own” succeed is reasonable and likely. On the other hand, if there is no personal connection to the candidate but the advocate a policy that supports one’s lifestyle, work situation, or religious faith, will also obtain one’s support because helping its implementation will be in one’s self-interest. One’s political ideology play a role in organizing the political opinions that Americans hold but not as tightly as perhaps they do in other nations. This is so because, the main political ideologies in American politics, namely liberal and conservative, are so large and flexible as to combine the whole of either spectrum. For example, a liberal in the U.S. can include a progressive, a social liberal, a social democrat, a democratic socialist, a socialist, a communist and an anarchist. The media, as mentioned, is one of the main methods that people obtain the political information necessary to form an opinion about politics. This is so because most people do not have the time, funds or ability to research or investigate the political sector on their own. Accordingly, the media plays a vital role in support the American political system. Nowadays, because the public has the ability to access information anytime/anywhere, the demands on the media to constantly keep the public informed has grown substantially.
Taking into account the vital role that the media has in providing one of the primary bases from which most American develop their public opinion about politics, media can have significant positive and negative effects on the average American citizen. From a positive perspective, when the media acts independently in the public’s interest it can inform the citizen on issues, topics and information that the person may not normally have access to or the ability to access. For example, in 2013, the media used the revelations of Edward Snowden to inform the American public about the otherwise unknown extent of the NSA’s surveillance state. Those stories allowed the public to put pressure on the government to consider and make changes to their policy. Conversely, when the media acts under the influence of the state or in the interests of the state, it can lead literally to the “brainwashing” of the public. For example, in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, the media obediently reported, without independent verification, the discovery of weapons of mass destruction under their control. That reporting led to the faulted belief that if we did not invade, those WMDs would be used against us.