I believe that media has had an overall negative impact on politics in the last 50 years. While media allows politicians to reach more groups easily, it also opens up more opportunities for them to mess up. Take Howard Dean for example. After the speech where he shouted "Byah!", thats all that people now know him for, not for being a political figure. Without mass media that incident would have been localized to that single campaign rally, and his political career might have still been intact.