Understanding Media Influence on Politics

The class is political science Mass Media and Politics. Attached is a course desorption so you get an idea of what the class is like. This will help when deciding what kind of research question to come up within
The books used in this class are
Iyengar, Shanto. 2019. Media politics a citizen's guide. New York W.W. Norton and Company
ISBN 978-0-393-66487-4.
McChesney, Robert W. 2013. Digital Disconnect. New York: The New Press. ISBN
9781620970317.
These are the instructions
“Hi there! This is an important project. It's not important because I say it is, it's important because it's your real entry into the scholarly conversation. Your work, the seriousness with which you take it, and the effort you put into it, are what make it important, not my opinion or even the opinion of  your reviewers (more on that later). What you have read so far and written about in the textbook and journal articles and lectures has prepared you to undertake the next step, which is to delve further into a topic of your own interest in this subfield, and add some analysis that you find useful. There's an old saying that if there is a book out there that you'd like to read but no one has written it, that means you should write it. That's basically what all scholarship is--adding your perspective to an ongoing conversation by either challenging the conventional wisdom about any given topic, or choosing a side in an ongoing debate. (Christopher Howard's book, Thinking Like a Political Scientist, written for undergraduate audiences like this one, does a really good job of explaining this). You are free to develop any research topic you wish that you found interesting or relevant in the first nine chapters of the textbook that we've read. 
Let's first explain why this is a research "prospectus" and not a research "project": 
A research prospectus is a road map for the entirety of your future work on the research project; it is not simply a preliminary sample of the project. Instead, this is a Research "Prospectus" also sometimes called a "Proposal" or "Design." The purpose is a plan and an explanation, not a summary, not a preview, not an argument, not a history, not a biography, not an ideological battle to be waged. It is social scientific inquiry that satisfies a human curiosity to study and understand our most powerful institutions. Do not include detailed exposition of any part of your data; rather, use examples only insofar as they help to clarify the objectives and process of your projected research. The overall length of research prospectus draft can vary but should be 4-5 pages (1000-1250 words), double-spaced, plus a bibliography. Please try to not go far beyond this guideline. If you find yourself about to turn in 7 or 8 pages or more, please review your paper or ask someone else for help in removing portions that do not directly address the materials required for this assignment.
The basic structure of the prospectus should be as listed below.
This template is not intended to be a rigid formula, but a guide to help you structure your proposal and make sure that you are not omitting any major components.
Sections may be re-ordered or combined as appropriate, in consultation with your instructor.
There should also be an introduction and thesis statement to frame the work, although this section is not graded/assessed as such, merely as part of the whole.
There will not be heavy supervision of your topic selection, but it will be important that your research proposal is for original research that has not been done before and that you do not believe others are doing in a similar way. 
Your literature review should see at least four peer-reviewed journal articles as sources, in addition to a book that has prior approval from the instructor.
The object of a literature review is to establish 1) that a topic has not been studied before in the way that you intend to do it, and 2) to find the articles that come closest to what you intend to do, so that you can demonstrate why your addition to the "literature" is necessary and should be welcomed into the research community.  It could be that you
a) found new evidence that changes past research project results or
b) you believe you have a different method for studying this question/these questions are more effective and trustworthy than past research, and thus
c) can contribute in a positive way to the ongoing academic/scholarly conversation about this topic.
You are not restricted as to what journals to find your four articles in.
Prof. will post lectures on the following topics, which roughly correspond to the 5 categories which are graded in the rubric:
* How to search for sources in the University Library to do a Literature Review
* The importance of a literature review
* How to formulate a Research Question
* Research Methods: How to use Online Data (from the University of California-Santa Barbara, the Universities of Virginia and Michigan,  Cornell University, Presidential Library documents online and/or Presidential Libraries linked to our University Library, or How to Determine if other Fieldwork is needed and what kind.
* The Chicago Manual of Style and its use in Political Science
You will be asked to share your work with the class May 10-11, 2021. You will also be asked to post your research question paragraph into a Google Doc to share with the class starting May 3-4.
Section / Explanation
Literature Review (Quality of Article Selection and Clarity of Logic/Explanation of these articles in relation to your proposal).
This section surveys the existing scholarship, summarizing the arguments prior studies have advanced and briefly contrasting their conceptual frameworks and methods. Your treatment of the literature should help to identify the gaps, blind spots, and interpretive errors that make your own proposed intervention productive. In many cases, there will be more than one intersecting body of literature that is relevant to the project – not only the work that directly addresses your substantive area of inquiry, but work that deals with the broader and more abstract questions that you are raising (for instance, comparative concepts of communal or national identity before the rise of the nation state).
Research question(s), hypotheses, and analytical framework and its significance.
This section should begin with a succinct and pithy statement of the question (or perhaps the interrelated questions) you propose to pursue. If you cannot express it in one to three sentences, it is probably because your project has not yet completely crystallized. Once you’ve articulated your question in a direct and concise form, you can go on to elaborate on it.  Explain how pursuing this question will contribute to broader understanding in your field and the literatures you discuss. Articulate your working hypotheses or the analytical framework you will adopt to address these questions and organize your collection and interpretation of information (e.g. texts, data, interviews). Remember, this is a proposal for research that you have not yet carried out; at most, it can project results based on your preliminary research and relevant existing secondary research that you hope to substantiate when your collection and analysis of data is complete. This element involves stepping back from your immediate scholarly question to place it within a larger picture, explaining the broader impact and benefit of the new approach you are proposing to your problem (and the costs – intellectual, political, social – of failing to understand it).
Methodology/Timeline
This section describes the conceptual framework and theoretical angle of your project, making clear why each is the most appropriate approach to the problem you are addressing. Here, you should build on the literature-review section to demonstrate how your approach contrasts with, supplements or corrects existing conceptualizations of and approaches to the research problem. A tentative proposal for the internal organization of the project should state the material that each chapter will cover, and convey how each chapter fits into the larger project.
Bibliography and citations (Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition). Quotations and Citations should all be footnoted, and you can annotate the list, according to the Chicago Manual of Style. You should also separate them into primary and secondary sections, or divide the sources up by chapter.
Good luck! I'm excited for you to begin this reseach journey, and hope to be a resource and guide for you along the way.”
The book for this class can be accessed here : ASK SUPPORT