Media as a linkage institution | Political participation | US government and civics | Khan Academy

You have a government and you also have the people that are governed. In previous videos, we talked about this idea of linkage institutions, which are institutions that connect the government to the people and the people to the government. So, people know what's going on in the government and so that the government knows the preferences of the people.

Examples of linkage institutions, let me just draw an arrow here. Examples of linkage institutions might be elections, where the people are able to communicate their preferences, parties, where that could obviously influence elections but also influence policies. You have various interest groups, but what we're going to focus on in this video is the media.

Now, there's one pure view of the media, and sometimes it's called the fourth estate, where it has a central role in government. The goal is to hold the government accountable, to inform the people, to have this pure objective view of what is going on with the government and bring it to the people and then help the people hold the government accountable. It also helps the government know objectively what the people are thinking. That is an ideal that many in the media may strive for, but you have to think about what are the incentives. What makes the media relevant and how do they exist?

Most media outlets are for-profit organizations. So, let me make a few of these. Let's say that we have this one right over here, I'll call this media outlet one. Let me do this one right over here; let's call this media outlet two. As for-profit organizations, they need to get revenue, so they can get their profit somehow, and for most of them, it comes through ad revenue.

So, those ad dollars that are shown during the news or during a TV show. You might guess that, hey, if I need to get ad revenue, advertisers aren't going to want to show ads on a station that's not getting any viewership. So, they're going to say, hey, how do we get maximum viewership? One argument might be, hey, we want to be the most objective, high-quality news source and that is a strategy that could be approached.

Or they could say, hey, maybe I could cater to certain belief systems to maybe left-leaning folks or right-leaning folks. If you were to say that this is the distribution of people in our population right over here, where people on this side lean left and then people on the right side right over here lean to the right, and these are people in between. There absolutely is a strategy where maybe if you are this media outlet you say, hey, I want to be centrist, maybe give equal time, equal views to either side and maybe I get that viewership.

But you could also have a strategy as well. What if I want to capture all of these folks? Well, what they might want to hear is something that's more critical of the right that reinforces their left beliefs, and so I could cater to that. Similarly, you might have something on the right saying, I could capture all of this audience here by helping to some degree, telling them what they want to hear and maybe in some level reinforcing their beliefs.

But by doing that, I get a large audience and I'm able to sell a lot of ads. It's an interesting debate whether it is good or bad that you have these media outlets that might cater to certain ideologies. But even if they are, they're still performing their role on some level as a linkage institution because these folks are trying to cater and understand what their viewership wants. That is a signal to the government that, okay, at least the demographic that watches media station one, this is the kind of stuff they're thinking about. And the demographic that watches media station two, these are the things that they are thinking about.

So, it does communicate in some way to government. But you can imagine almost every media outlet is trying to market that they are that ideal objective. Here's an example of that, where a media outlet is actually reporting on how non-objective other media outlets are, in their opinion or perhaps in the opinion of their viewers.

"Tonight, a fair and balanced examination of the mainstream media's bias with three glaring new examples. First up, Donald Trump is firing back at the Washington Post after learning the paper's devoted an army of 20 staffers to dig up dirt on every nook and cranny of his life."

Now, another dimension to appreciate how the media as a linkage institution might influence government or, frankly, might influence other linkage institutions like elections is how they report on things. Remember, they're trying to get viewership because the viewership is what makes the advertisers want to advertise on their media outlets.

To get viewership, one strategy is to make things really exciting, make it look like a sports competition, make it look like a horse race. You see this especially during elections, that oftentimes the focus may not even be on the substance. It's really on who's leading at a given time. That can sometimes influence the election and give that person extra momentum, regardless of what their actual positions are.

And here is an example of that: "Hillary Clinton is extending her lead over Donald Trump in several national polls. CNN is releasing a brand new poll of polls, which is an average of the six last surveys, and it shows Donald Trump trailing Hillary Clinton by 10 points. So, how does he close that gap? Donald Trump's reached new heights in the latest Fox News poll with 39 percent of Republicans nationwide. He's more than doubling Ted Cruz at 18. Marco Rubio and Ben Carson are virtually tied for third within the poll's margin of error."

So, the media is definitely a very important linkage institution in our society, but it's really interesting to think about the various incentives for it and how that might influence its actions as a linkage institution and how its motivations might even affect other linkage institutions like elections.