ABSTRACT

President John Kennedy once said, “the flow of ideas, the capacity to make informed choices, the ability to criticize, all of the assumptions on which political democracy rests, depend largely on communications.” Democracy requires an informed citizenry, and the communication of political information is an essential prerequisite for political participation. In an era when news outlets and journalists are accused of creating so-called fake news, it may be difficult for people to know where to get reliable information about politics. Indeed, contemporary research indicates that many Americans are skeptical about what they see, hear, and read in the media. The tension between freedom of the press and government restrictions on that freedom is one of several key issues related to the role of the mass media in a democratic society. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 38 journalists were killed for their work in the first nine months of 2016 alone.