Mediacracy

Mediacracy is a situation in government where the mass media effectively has control over the voting public. Mediacracy is closely related to a theory on the role of media in the United States political system, that argues that media and news outlets have a large level of influence over voting citizens' evaluations of candidates and political issues, thereby possessing effective control over politics in the United States.

The term "mediacracy" was first coined in 1974 by writer and political commentator Kevin Phillips, who used the term in the title of his book Mediacracy: American Parties and Politics in the Communications Age. Since then, the concept has gained popularity and is used by political scientists and researchers alike to discuss the impact of media on both voting behavior and cultural trends. Most recently, the term has seen a resurgence due to the works of economist and author Fabian Tassano. In his book Mediocracy: Inversions and Deceptions in an Egalitarian Culture Tassano argues that the 'dumbing down' of popular media when coupled with increasing obscurity in scholarly discourse leads to a society which has the appearance of egalitarianism, but ultimately is a society ruled by elites. As a reflection of this, the term mediacracy is usually accompanied by negative assumptions about the true nature of media in the United States, along with the aims and desires of mass media as a whole.

There are three main potential causes for the rise in the media's influence on elections, being a combination of different theories on the cultural influence of mass media and recent populist democratic reforms in the American political system. Supporters of the mediacracy theory argue that when taken together, these causes greatly show that the media have a large level of influence over politics in the United States, drawing a link between media's leverage on public opinion, and the increased power that public opinion has on who is elected to office. These potential causes include, but are not limited to:

Agenda-setting refers to the ability of the media to affect the salience of issues on the public agenda. In short, the amount of attention paid to a certain issue will lead to audiences viewing that issue as more important. The theory of agenda-setting was formally developed by Dr. Max McCombs and Dr. Donald Shaw in their study on the 1968 presidential election conducted at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. McCombs and Shaw polled 100 residents of the Chapel Hill community and found a strong correlation between what those residents believed to be the most important election issue, and what local and national media outlets reported as the most important election issue. This was a landmark study that displayed a link between an issue's salience in media content and the corresponding salience of that issue in voter's minds.

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