For political candidates, getting a story in the news is crucial to reaching voters and shaping the public debate around your race. But with national politics volatile and the country polarized, it’s easy to get lost in the sea of flamboyant click-bait stories that dominate today’s headlines.
Whether they’re about a controversial presidential tweet or the latest scandal surrounding one of your rivals, it’s important to know how to spot a phony political article so you can avoid reading it. Luckily, there are certain times of the week (Fridays after 3pm, weekends, and the day before holidays) when reporters have less pressing deadlines and your press release is more likely to make the cut.
News media in modern democracies serve several positive functions for their audience. These include recording and reflecting events in a democratic society, acting as a watchdog to disclose political misbehavior and facilitate public discourse, and encouraging citizen participation. It is widely accepted that these functionalities are best fulfilled under conditions of democratic media freedom, a term characterized by free and open access to the media for all citizens, an absence of government censorship, and the availability of a plurality of sources and information.
It is also well established that the picture of reality presented in the news media, irrespective of its accuracy or distortion and whether it is neutral or biased, influences the political behavior of individual citizens, societal groups, and political leaders and nation-states. The research of communication scholars generally focuses on three questions: what do people get from the news? How do they use it? And how does the news media shape political reality and even create the events that it seems to represent?