Media's Effects on Political Elections

Mao ZeDong once said that power comes out of the barrel of a gun. While that is still true, power also comes out of the manipulated images created to change ones thinking process and behaviour. Through the world of third person communication, technologies have generated various types of media.
Practically, in every attitude of the election campaign will engage the media. In fact, media is the ultimate platform where all political parties will be fighting on. Whether by budging through television and news reports or by purchasing time and space on mass media, parties must always use media to hype voters for support.
Media organizations have their own agenda. They tend to sell themselves to the audiences with their star reporters, journalists, and as much as they can cover over the course of election. Inevitably, news will be discriminately selected, stories will be twisted, and they will be promoted with personal views and reactions. Mass media, therefore, will have powerful influences on voters.
now that the election is over, I have to wonder: did any of the tweets, Facebook groups, or YouTube videos actually make a measurable difference?
Certainly, many of the candidates had active social media accounts, and the a lot of the Twitter hashtags were on fire during the election. But online activity is very difficult to link with the offline behavior of marking a ballot with a golf pencil. Ultimately, once you're behind that cardboard partition, voting is a private action. A secret ballot is, after all, secret.
In many ways, this stands in stark contrast to how things work on the web. Social media marketing and advertising is very measurable. Hyperlinks can easily be tracked to generate a myriad of stats and reports on our collective online behaviour.

It reminds us that 2008 was called the “social media election”, with 1.8 million tweets sent on election day… and that now, in 2012, there are 1.8 million tweets sent every six minutes.
Barack Obama’s appearance at the Democratic National Convention caused over 52,000 tweets to be sent, on average, every minute, resulting in about 4 million tweets total during his 39 minute speech.
And other representatives are jumping on social media too: 9 out of 10 Senators and Representatives have their own Twitter accounts.
The infographic also points out that 4 out of 10 people will use social media to help them make a decision come election day, so the candidates had better do all they can to present themselves in the best light, in 140-characters or less.
People slowly drift away from how things were the way they were, media is growing, the numbers on the social media accounts are growing each minute. In the end not everything on media is going to be good, you can never believe everything you see/hear with the media.