The Death of Watchdog Journalism: A Comparative Look at Media Coverage in South Africa and the United States The media has developed to become "an important player in any political system". The evolution of the media has allowed citizens to monitor the state and its actors in a way that was never possible before its existence. In an ideal world, this connection will allow the media to provide citizens with the tools and information to make it easier to report the reprehensible actions of their governing bodies and move towards developing a state of accountability. The purpose of this essay is to discuss why this is not always the case, and how less developed countries and liberal democracies face different obstacles in trying to achieve this goal. The fundamental roles of the media are often distorted by external factors, such as the power that some states possess, the news media that have chosen to sacrifice truth for entertainment, and the elites that have the power, money and influence to alter media content to benefit them. Whether you are in a less developed country or a liberal democracy, the universal obligation of the media is to the citizens to be independent parties and develop news through the watchdog method, but it depends on the political situation of the state providing the obstacles that the media must pass to achieve this goal. The countries that will be used to prove this thesis will be the United States as a liberal democracy and South Africa as our least developed country. In the United States, the media began as independent journalists developing newsworthy information that facilitates the development of well-informed citizens. This idea has now shifted to high-profile privatized media conglomerates that are more concerned with…half the paper…the truth” (Kovach, Rosentiel, 1). The ideas surrounding watchdog journalism have been undermined in both liberal democracies and less developed countries. Either we are in a society where attempting to hold the government accountable for its reprehensible actions could result in a ten-year prison sentence, or we are in a society where news content is diluted with attempts to distract passive consumers from state discrepancies . In both societies, the faces of media conglomerates are simply puppets for elite puppeteers attempting to gain profit and visibility from sources that are supposed to remain impartial. It has become clear that the role of watchdog journalism is no longer the foundation of our current media. Instead, the media has become something that citizens can no longer trust, even as they are forced to consume it every day of their lives...