Editorial: Know your candidates before hitting the polls The South Texan |
 Jeremy Martinez / The South Texan |
With the primaries taking place across the nation, voters seem to be very passionate about who they are voting for.
Many Obama voters believe he is a “brilliant” man who is going to bring change to America. Clinton supporters believe that she has the experience of being in the White House that other candidates lack. Supporters believe that Republican front runner McCain is going to bring back the old values of government, an America where there is less government involvement.
And with celebrities such as Oprah, Chuck Norris and Barbara Streisand saying wonderful things about their candidates of choice it seems that it has become easier for people to trust the words of others instead of taking the time to really understand what each candidate will bring to the presidency.
Americans have no excuse in the current information age to still rely on what people or celebrities are saying about candidates.
In the history of political campaigning, celebrity endorsement have always been a well-known tactic called the two-step flow process. When it took weeks for mail to travel and the only outlet for those who could read was newspapers, it was a smart tactic to use celebrities as a way to get messages across to the American people.
Candidates knew that celebrities were the easiest way to gain the votes of a public who did not have access to information about them; in other words the people would associate the trustworthiness of a celebrity to the candidate that the celebrity endorsed.
And although the tactics and candidates who use them haven’t changed, the American public’s access to information has become readily available.
Americans have access to a wealth of information on TV, network radio, satellite radio podcasts and of course, the World Wide Web. Miniwatts Marketing Group says that 210 million Americans have access to the internet. The National Cable and Television Association say that 112 million Americans have a television and 65 million subscribe to cable television.
A growth in the number of networking websites that connect millions of Americans to each other every day. YouTube, MySpace and Facebook are a national sensation. They give Americans access to music, video, news and more all on one site.
YouTube announced in 2006 that it now serves 100 million videos per day. What’s more, the site served 2.5 billion videos to nearly 20 million unique visitors over the course of June. According to the Hitwise stats, the company had a 29% share of the US multimedia entertainment market in 2006.
According to TechCrunch.com 69 million people had a MySpace Account and 35 million had a Facebook account as of Dec. 2007. According to PCWorld.com, about 25 million visit MySpace alone everyday. Comscore.com reported in 2006 that the public's visiting Myspace are becoming older; more than half of the visitors on both sites are over 18, the legal voting age.
Why are these statistics important? Every single presidential candidate has pages on these sites. YouTube even hosted two separate debates featuring both Democrat and Republican candidates and used questions submitted from people around the nation.
This means that the American public has a wealth of information available at their fingertips. And since there is proof that we are already logging onto these websites on a daily basis there is no excuse for being unformed about what the political candidates and their beliefs.
There is no longer a need to rely on others for information; it is readily available to us at our fingertips and before our eyes.
It is time for the American public to take the time to discover what each political candidate really stands for and how they plan to run our country. Americans who vote should know the issues, problems, concerns and solutions that these candidates have mapped out.
We, as adults, should become more responsible with the happenings surrounding our candidates so we can figure out for ourselves which candidate deserves our vote in the primaries, as well as November in the general election. By using the resources that our available to us, the American public will be stepping out of the trends of the past and creating a new trend, one where it is truly important to take advantage of the flow of information that is available to us.