Political Communication E- Portfolio

This semester in Political Communication has taught me a great deal about how politics and communication really go hand in hand. This was an extremely interesting time to study political communication due to the fact that the presidential primary elections have been taking place throughout the semester. This of course made it crucial to look at how political communication works and why it is important. 

Key Concepts

While we learned many concepts in our class, a few really stuck out to me. One of the first key concepts we learned was what exactly political communication is. This key concept is of course the framework for the entire class, but it is a word with many definitions. A few of those definitions include the way the political system creates, shapes, disseminated, and processes information, the way citizens and their governments interact, and the communicative activity of citizens, public and governmental institutions, the media, advocacy groups, and social movements. While this concept of political communication is defined as a few different things it is one of the most important concepts we learned. Learning how the politicians, the press, and the public all work together to spread information and receive information is extremely important when any election season is coming up.

Another key concept we learned was Agenda Setting. Agenda Setting is the media’s ability to choose and emphasize certain topics which may cause the public to see these issues as important. Every news organization has their own way of choosing the topics they push or talk about the most, however not every person getting their information from these news organizations will recognize it. This is extremely important in political communication because the media has control over what we see, meaning they have the power to make certain issues going on seem important to the consumers. Anything the media wants to portray as important becomes important because they are typically pushing that story or information the most. Even candidates have been strategically placed in the news. You tend to hear more about Donald Trump then you do Bernie Sanders, meaning that someone looking into the news might make an assumption that Trump is popular and liked and should be voted in.

We also learned about Narratives that candidates have. Narratives are simply background stories and stories in general that candidates try to mix into their campaign. Most of the candidates want you to believe that they are one of “you”, and that you can trust them.  Two candidates that have been heavily using the narratives this campaign season are Hilary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Clinton has been using this idea that she is an everyday American. She says “If families are strong, America is strong.” Clinton has people buying into the idea that she is a big family woman and believes that every day average families are the most important thing about America. Bernie Sanders is another politician that is using a narrative for his campaign. The entire thing about Bernie Sanders is that he is not a typical rich politician and that he is an average guy just fighting for the people. Overall narratives help to give these politicians a back story which makes them more relatable to their potential voters.

Assignments

This semester in Political Communication has been a busy one! We have had quite a number of projects and assignments to complete over the past couple of months. One of the first projects we did was the first content analysis. For our content analysis my group compared Hilary Clinton and Carly Fiorina’s two campaign websites and took a deeper look at how the candidates promoted mobilization, public outreach, and social media on their websites. My contribution to the group was that I wrote the introduction, the social media portion of the findings, the graphics for the content and analysis and the conclusion. I also edited and put all three parts of the paper that was written by different people together. While this project was a little time consuming I enjoyed doing the research in order to see whose campaign website was better equipped with the things needed to get people involved and possible voters hooked on voting for them.

Another series of assignments that was completed this semester were the news articles. Two of the articles had to be written on political events around the area and one of the articles was written about the influence the Georgia primaries and the “Super Tuesday” primaries had on the races within a political party. The news stories came with a specific set of guidelines and made all the groups interview a set number of people as well as take pictures or video of the events to include with them. While the news stories were all different topics the duties that I did for the stories was almost the same. For the first news story we attended a Bernie Sanders rally. At this rally I interviewed some students and was able to get a lot of information about why they were there and what they liked most about Sanders. After interviewing students and experiencing the atmosphere of the rally I was able to start working on the news story. I also edited the story for AP style. The next news story was the story on the John Kasich Town Hall event at Kennesaw. For this event I was in charge of helping to write the paper and format for AP style.  The last new story we did was one written on the Georgia primaries and Super Tuesday primaries. For this news story I was I worked on interviewing people, writing the conclusion, and formatting the paper into AP style.

Bernie Sanders kicking off his HBCU tour at Morehouse College in Atlanta, on Feb.16,2016.  

Dustyn Archer, 24 year old student from Middle Georgia State University holds up his Sanders sign in order to show his support

Lindzzi Ngati, James Brown, & Ayomi Omotoso visted from Clark Atlanta University to watch Bernie Sanders speak.

The next assignment after the news stories was the Field Research Project. This project allowed for us to put the information we gained from the political events we attended into a bigger project. We used our observations and interviews in order to do a qualitative report on the Bernie Sanders rally, with our research question being “How does Bernie Sanders appeal to young adult voters, and is it working?” For this project I contributed with writing a large part of the research project, interviewing people, and editing the paper when we finished it.

Our final big project was the Content Analysis 2, which was based on the framing of the media. We took a look at two news organizations where we compared 25 articles from each to see how they presented their news within the four frames. The four frames that we took a look at were horse race, conflict, issues, and candidate attributes, and the two news organizations we compared were MSNBC and Politico. For this project I contributed by finding 25 articles off of Politico, checking over the coding done, writing the introduction and conclusion and helping to edit the paper and put it all together.

Detailed graph created to show the break down of the four frames between the two news organizations.

 

Learning Objectives

Demonstrating the ability to produce high quality research projects relating to political communication in American elections.

-          Throughout this semester we were assigned a handful of projects that allowed us to enhance our research skills and learn how to correctly put together a successful project. I believe my groups and I produced high quality research projects by working together as a team in order to create the best project possible. While I have taken research classes prior to this one I believe political communication helped me perfect my skills in writing research papers and even in conducting research in general. Something that I had personally never heard of was coding, but with the help of my group members who were political science majors I seemed to get the hang of coding. I would say that this learning objective was one that I successfully accomplished.

 Accurately describing and providing critical perspectives on the intersection between political communication and American elections

-          Another learning objective we had was to provide perspective on political communication and the American elections. For our hybrid day in our class we were assigned a weekly bog post. These blog posts allowed us to make a comparison and add perspective to politics and communication by constantly making a relation between the two concepts and how they work together to create political communication. I would say this learning objective is one that I successfully accomplished by writing blog posts every week and looking up more information on the relationship between politics and communication.

Producing high quality political journalism on the theme of American elections

-          This learning objective is one that I believe I exceled in the most. As a journalism student, writing news stories is something that I have been taught to do over the past four years of college. The three news stories were all really about getting some good quotes and capturing the feel of the event and capturing the way the voters feel. Interviewing is one of my favorite things about writing a news story, because a good quote can make an entire story. While interviewing people it was clear that just interviewing the needed three sources would not be enough to get a hard hitting quote. Instead I was interviewing 5-6 people in order to get something worth quoting in the new stories.  Overall looking at my work put into the news stories produced I would say that I successfully accomplished this learning objective.

Respectfully observing American political communication processes in practice.

-          The final learning objective is the one that I enjoyed the most. Throughout this semester we were given numerous opportunities to see the political communication process in practice. I was able to go to a few events around the city and see how candidates were trying to sell themselves to potential voters. The Bernie Sanders rally was my favorite event that I observed. He kicked off his HBCU tour in Atlanta at Morehouse College. The momentum in the room was amazing and as it was my first real political event that I had ever attended like that. I think that I successfully accomplished this learning objective and that attending these events was the best part of this class.