Mr Smith Goes To Washington Essay

In the United States, politics is always present in our daily lives. Politics is important because it shapes the way we live our lives. We live in a society where there is order and stability but also liberty and freedom of speech and it is because of the well-structured constitution written by The Framers at the Philadelphia Convention of 1789. Watching the film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington made me learn about concepts of American politics in a way that was entertaining and not at all boring. It is a fascinating film with an excellent script and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to have fun while also learning about politics. The beginning of the movie starts when a senator from an unnamed state dies and the governor, named Hubert

According to the Oxford dictionary, a filibuster is “an action, such as a prolonged speech, that obstructs progress in a legislative assembly while not technically contravening the required procedures”. In politics, a filibuster is usually used so that one can obstruct the progress of a bill, or to convince the senate to work on another bill. In the film Mr. Smith goes to Washington, Jefferson Smith does a filibuster to prove his innocence and to obstruct the progress of the dam building bill. Smith achieves this by speaking nonstop for 24 hours without sitting down, in an attempt to make the people in the senate and the people of his state understand that he is innocent. Performing a filibuster in the senate requires the speaker “to not yield,” which means that a speaker must not sit down while speaking so that he can continue on with a filibuster. Another concept that the film portrays perfectly is the usage of mass media. Mass media according to our notes is defined as a “linkage mechanism, such as television, radio, newspaper, magazines, and the internet, capable of rapidly communicating information to large numbers of people over large distances.” Since the film’s setting is the 1930’s, the media that was used in order to rapidly communicate information were newspapers, radio, and magazines. In the film, the radio and newspaper are used to spread information in different ways. At the start of the film, the newspaper is used in a big way to make fun of Smith by calling him dumb when he is interviewed by journalists shortly after he arrived in Washington DC. Later in the film, when Smith is performing a filibuster, the majority of the newspapers and radio stations speak negatively of Smith and are do not even mention his filibuster due to Jim Taylor’s