Television is responsible for growing disillusionment with politics. Do you agree?

Television and the Growing Disillusionment with Politics

It is an accepted fact that in this age of technological advancement , television is one of the

choices which together with the print and broadcast media formed the so called tri-media

outlet in journalist profession . Television provides the audience of information and news with

a way by which realism of truth perception can be achieved . The author Alice Hall (2003 ) in

her research on audience 's evaluations of the reality of media texts said that there are 6

distinct means of evaluating

the realism of media texts : plausibility typicality , factuality

emotional involvement , narrative consistency , and perceptual persuasiveness ( Abstract . The

author added that plausibility was considered the most popular as far as conceptualization

development is concerned . Moreover , the author said that different conceptualizations of

realism are being used by people and tends to focus on the different features of the evaluated

information . This view was supported by studies conducted by Maris (1996 , Shum (1997

and Shapiro and Fox (2002 . This information on conceptualization led us to conclude that

television is seen as provider of strong reinforcement as to the plausibility of the developed

concept of realism related to the information provided . In relation to this , television viewers

have the tendency to be confused and disillusioned as to the truthfulness of information

received . The reinforcement of the truthfulness of the information received and its social

reliability depend on the unconscious evaluation of realism as mentioned by Hall (2003 . In

recent years , Australian political campaign has adopted the use of negative political

advertising patterned after the US practice . Today , it became more vicious and more personal (Young , 2003 . The Australian voters who were not used to this kind of political campaign

strategy with the aid of television were left groping in the dark as who and what to believe in

This aim to document the political disillusionment of Australian voters as a result of

being exposed to the campaign materials in television . Furthermore , it is also aimed that this

situation be compared to other non-western countries

It was revealed that fifty years ago , the political campaigns in Australia were not as active

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and lively as it is today in the decade of 2000s (Young , 2002 According to the author who

was a former Vice President and Campaign Manager of the Liberal Party in Queensland

Fifty years ago , the market place in which politicians operated was radically different , and it

shaped the way they governed . They faced a homogenous mass market Electors were very

loyal to their brand (96 .1 per cent voted for one of the majors in the 1949 election (2nd para

The author added that society was very hierarchical in those times and those in the higher up

of the social tree can dictate their influence over the lower ones Furthermore , the author said

that Australian voters were relatively passive during the 50s as consumer movement had

not yet been invented in those times . With the voting population much smaller than they...