Media affected political elections and shaping public opinion

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Communications - Mass Media, grade: A, , language: English, abstract: Political elections are seen to be very important to every country, so in the agenda setting, media gate-keepers tends to rank it very high and show on prime time to attract audiences. Attractive pictures, figures and larger fonts are adopted in order to around public awareness. The images of candidates are all depends on how media shape them and the way of reporting. Public opinions will then form after audiences receiving different kind of information from media. In a certain extent, I believe the effect of media in political elections is influential to voters. Media has bias in transmitting the message and thus attract different group of political elections voters. In advertisements of elections, the quantity, use of words and variation of targeted voters can affect voters' selections in political elections. Yet, accumulated believes and value system is not easy to change under the perceived predisposition. The selective perception and selective retention set limits towards the effect of mass media.