Television is the most influential medium in American society and has been for many years.

Americans perceive television primarily as an entertainment medium, but many Americans also depend on it as a source of information about many issues, including politics.

In 2004, the American National Election Study found that 86 percent of people said they followed the 2004 presidential campaign on television.

Television is perceived as more credible than print, according to studies by Journalism.org, the Pew Research Center, and others, and this is probably due to the visual nature of the medium. However, the same reports show that trust in both local television and national networks has steadily declined (as has trust in all media sources).

Reporters seem to be automatically suspicious of the motives of elected officials and politicians running for office.

Politicians believe that the time, money, and energy they devote to press relations will pay off in the form of reelection or support for their policy proposals.

While the public relies on the news media as a source of information about politics, politicians also depend on the press, both in elections and in governing.

Since the 1970s, Americans have become much more likely to identify themselves as independents rather than as Democrats or Republicans. The weakening of the political parties has made it possible for more individuals to run for office without spending years paying their dues in the parties. But it has also affected the ability of the parties to speak effectively to voters and mobilize them at election time.

As a result of the weakening of the political parties, candidates have to cultivate their own relationships with voters, and the way they do that is through the mass media.

In the early days of the nation, the press was blatantly partisan, as it still is in many other democratic countries.

Theodore Roosevelt, our first truly media-savvy president, tried to use the reporters who covered the White House for his own benefit. He gave them access that they hadn't previously enjoyed, but he also threatened to take away that access if their reporting displeased him.

Elected officials and candidates for office need to get their views out to the voting public, and the members of the press see their job as screening those views for truth. The result is that the press and politicians have very different imperatives that clash with each other dramaticall

The Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates of 1960 were another important series of events in the emergence of television as a political medium.

Today, thanks to the development of cable and satellite technology, television provides a twenty-four-hour forum of political news and information.

The equal time rule originated in the Radio Act of 1927, and it can also be found in Section 315 of the Communications Act of 1934. It requires that stations provide all political candidates the opportunity to appear. If a station sells or gives advertising time to one candidate, it must offer the same opportunity to the other candidates in that race.

ed massive amounts of money to purchase air time to run their political campaigns from media companies that are licensed to use the airwaves which are owned by the America

Neither the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is concerned with the average middle-class Americans upon whose backs the prosperity of America was built. Both parties ne

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ernment Americans need to listen very carefully to the mass media pundits and then realize that six conglomerates control nearly all the media in America. Americans need to listen for what they are not being told is to blindly accept mass media's version of reality. Americans need to stop tuning in to hear the latest titillating gossip about this missing person, that sensational murder and the escapades of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

For Americans to regain control of the