The Impact of “New Media” on Public Opinion About American Government and Politics and What it Means for the 2024 Election
Written By
London Allen
June 13, 2024
While legacy media technologies were shifting schedule and form until the late ’90s, they were no match for the wave of adoption of the internet and “New Media,” which enabled the digital reception of content. Digitizing communication changes how people communicate in noticeable ways as it allows information to “reach large audiences and in many cases do so with startling speed” (Abernathy 2021). Not only was the speed altered, but so did the type of information people had access to. The trend of specialized content that cable news began was intensified via the internet. Media consumers are no longer limited to what has mass appeal, as niche journalism can cater to specific audiences even more directly. Social media outlets have also led to an influx of citizen journalists.
As technologies evolve, the way the public gets its news has changed. While I still pick up my local newspaper occasionally, I generally learn, interpret, and derive conclusions about American politics via social media or the internet. This is a stark difference from how my family and I received information as I was growing up. We were usually found getting ready on weekday mornings with TV news broadcasts in the background. It’s clear that the adoption of new technologies, and consequently new media, has streamlined how quickly the public learns information. It’s also impacted which information we learn about and how we discern trustworthy information.
Although “New Media” seems to have been a catalyst for the influx of bias in news media, legacy media was already shifting in this direction. New Media is not inherently harmful for allowing biased or unreliable coverage—especially considering the pace news media moves. Reliable information can still be discerned by the public, but due to the large scope of new media, it requires a greater effort in critical thinking on the part of the consumers of this information. In 2019, 53% of U.S. adults identified news media as responsible for reducing made-up information (Abernathy 2021); however, in late-stage capitalism, with many media outlets being commercially driven, this expectation can seem far-fetched. It is interesting how, as citizens, the public expects politicians and government officials to be untrustworthy, but we have generated a culture that does not want to take responsibility for how consumers interact and interpret news personally.
“Digitizing communication changes how people communicate in noticeable ways as it allows information to ‘reach large audiences and in many cases do so with startling speed’”