reducing corruption, and increasing how responsive elected ofﬁcials are to their
constituents (Brunetti and Weder 2003; Besley and Prat 2006; Snyder and
Strömberg 2008). Again, we do not want to romanticize journalism as we
knew it. News is necessarily always imperfect, and for much of the twentieth
century much of it was all too often by white men, about white men, for white
men, uncomfortably close to political elites and oriented toward the afﬂuent,
often not trusted, and not always trustworthy. Yet while journalism arguably
has been able to do less for democracy than many journalists and academics like
to think (Gans 2003), and sometimes plays a more ambiguous role, news is
integral to actually existing democracies, because it helps citizens navigate the
(public) world beyond personal experience.
Social_Media_and_Democracy