When a Bible-quoting Sunday School teacher, Jimmy Carter, won the 1976 presidential election, it marked the start of a new era of presidential campaign discourse. The successful candidates since then have followed Carter's lead in publicly testifying about their personal religious beliefs and invoking God to justify their public policy positions and their political visions. With this new confessional political style, the candidates have repudiated the former perspective of a civil-religious contract that kept political leaders from being too religious and religious leaders from being too...

New Media, Old Regimes: Case Studies in Comparative Communication Law and Policy, by Lyombe S. Eko, is a collection of novel theoretical perspectives and case studies which illustrate how different communication law regimes conceptualize and apply universal ideals of human rights and freedom of expression to media controversies in real space and cyberspace. Eko's investigation includes such controversial communication policy topics as North African regimes' failed use of telecommunications to suppress the social change of the Arab Spring, the Mohammad cartoon controversy in Denmark and...

Manipulating Images: World War II Mobilization of Women through Magazine Advertising explores gendered and class-based representations of American women in women's magazine advertisements published during the period surrounding the Second World War. Focusing on the interrelationships among political, economic, and social forces in the construction of prevailing cultural images and gender roles for women in society, the book examines both the process of creating and the resulting content of wartime mobilization messages found in magazine advertising aimed at American women. The unique...

Culture, Race, and Class-Based Perspectives in Public Relations, edited by Damion Waymer, covers timely and understudied topics in the field of public relations (PR). Via research, case analysis, and theoretical discussion, the contributors to this volume explore the ways that scholars can address issues of voice (or the lack thereof) that marginalized publics have encountered in the past or are currently encountering in regard to matters of culture, race, and class. A central question this book asks is what role can and does a greater understanding of culture, race, and class play in helping...

Politics and the Twitter Revolution: How Tweets Influence the Relationship between Political Leaders and the Public by John H. Parmelee and Shannon L. Bichard is the first comprehensive examination of how Twitter is used politically. Surveys and in-depth interviews with political Twitter users answer several important questions, including: Who follows the political leaders on Twitter, and why? How persuasive are political tweets? Is political Twitter use good for democracy? These and other questions are answered from theoretical perspectives, such as uses and gratifications, word-of-mouth...

Accusations of partisan bias in Presidential election coverage are suspect at best and self-serving at worst. They are generally supported by the methodology of instance confirmation, tainted by the hostile media effect, and based on simplistic visions of how the news media are organized. Media Bias in Presidential Election Coverage 1948-2008 by Dave D'Alessio, is a revealing analysis that shows the news media have four essential natures: as journalistic entities, businesses, political actors, and property, all of which can act to create news coverage biases, in some cases in opposing...

This edited volume fills a void in the literature concerning the purpose, practice, and pedagogy associated with performing rhetorical criticism. Literature regarding these issues--predominantly purpose--exists primarily as scattered journal articles and as sections within chapters of textbooks on rhetorical criticism. This book brings together 15 established rhetorical critics, each of whom offers well thought out and argued opinion pieces that stress the more personal nature of criticism. The purpose of this book is to serve as a disciplinary resource, and as a teaching and learning aid....

This diverse and unique collection of essays examines a wide range of communication elements and themes in the context of the 2012 election. Topics include the early campaign and Romney's nomination battle, candidate image, the rhetoric and campaigning of Michelle Obama and Ann Romney, issues of race, persuasive appeals to voters, the use of music and social media, and Obama's second inaugural address. Studies of Communication in the 2012 Presidential Campaign aims not only to expand the contributions and understandings of the various roles of communication in the 2012 presidential election,...

More than two billion dollars. That's how much money was spent in the 2012 presidential campaign--the most expensive campaign in history. Each party raised and spent more than one billion dollars as the traditional boundaries of campaign financing were ignored. Both parties could do so because they were playing in a game with new rules--rules that largely developed after the 2010 Supreme Court ruling known as Citizens United. That case removed many restrictions on donation limits, particularly for corporations and unions. The result was the development of a new set of political players called...

New Media, Old Regimes: Case Studies in Comparative Communication Law and Policy, by Lyombe S. Eko, is a collection of novel theoretical perspectives and case studies which illustrate how different communication law regimes conceptualize and apply universal ideals of human rights and freedom of expression to media controversies in real space and cyberspace. Eko's investigation includes such controversial communication policy topics as North African regimes' failed use of telecommunications to suppress the social change of the Arab Spring, the Mohammad cartoon controversy in Denmark and...