2016 U.S. Presidential Election and the Media

Abstract

This paper focuses on the media during the 2016 presidential election in the United States. First, two important phenomenon should be addressed: one is people’ s distrust of existing media, the other is media polarization. Both phenomenon had reached their bottom in recent years. Many incidents regarding the media are closely related with the two phenomenon. Those include the fake news syndromes, the liberal bias criticism, the popularity of fact checks, and candidates’ dependency on Twitter. Finally, this paper suggests that there are many similarities in terms of candidates’ media strategies between the past and 2016 elections, but some are quintessential to the 2016 campaign, such as lack of dependency on the Super PACs.