Political campaigns are highly complex and sophisticated communication events: communication of issues, images, social reality, and persons. They are essentially exercises in the creation, recreation, and transmission of significant symbols through human communication. As we attempt to make sense of our environment, political bits of communication inform our voting choices, world views, and legislative desires. This volume considers the 1992 presidential campaign from a communication perspective. Each chapter focuses on a specific area of political campaign communication: the communication...

Seib examines the ethical issues underlying the volatile relationship between journalists and politicians. It provides an inside look at how reporters and candidates do their jobs. From the screening process news organizations use to decide which candidates to cover, to the truth-testing of political ads, to the controversies surrounding election night projections, this work articulates crucial ethical questions and helps readers in their search for answers. As a political communications text, "Campaigns and Conscience" looks at the many facets of political journalism: what reporters need...

Since Nimmo and Savage's groundbreaking work, "Candidates and Their Images" (1976), there has been no book dedicated solely to the examination of political candidate images. This volume adds to the development of the candidate image construct initiated by Nimmo and Savage. It provides a compendium of state-of-the-art theory and research of candidate images and image formation in the U.S. presidential elections. The contributors to this work, among the best-known in the field of political communication, describe and explain how presidential election results hinge on voter perceptions of...

This study examines the tensions and interrelationships inherent in federal control of information in the technological era. Analyzing topics relating to information content and carrier issues, citizens' natural rights and utilities, and the effects of the executive and legislative branches, the author examines the historical definitions of information, traditional ethical principles, the parameters as framed by the Constitution, and three kinds of information control actions promulgated by the federal government (the Foreign Agents Registration and Propaganda Act, the Computer Security...

Political campaigns are highly complex and sophisticated communication events: communication of issues, images, social reality, and persons. They are essential exercises in the creation, re-creation, and transmission of significant symbols through human communication. As voters and others involved with the campaigns attempt to make sense of the political environment, political bits of communication inform voting choices, world views, and legislative desires.

The essays in this book examine the key elements in that process throughout the 1996 presidential campaign. Each focuses on a...

Over the past decade, the public's opinion of Congress has declined--election after election--to record lows. Mark J. Rozell examines the electorate's ongoing disgust with its legislature and the reasons for it. Putting recent Congresses in historical perspective, he notes that our modern representatives are actually "less" corrupt than those of the past, due in large measure to increased public scrutiny and ongoing tightening of ethics and conflict of interest rules. Still, the public remains skeptical, indeed hostile, toward that most representative of our national institutions. Rozell...

Denton and Woodward provide a newly updated revision of their classic in political communication. This pioneering text provides a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the role and function of communication in American politics.

A synthesis of some of the best writing in political communication from the fields of communication, political science, journalism, and history, this edition features completely new chapters on the topics of campaign management, congressional campaigns, politics and popular culture, and unofficial Washington. This edition also reflects updated sources and...

Conti examines presidential rhetoric on trade, providing a detailed analysis of presidential trade arguments and strategies throughout American history. She then concentrates on the rhetoric of contemporary presidents, who have had to contend with both the burgeoning trade deficit and the displacement of military competitiveness with post-cold war economic competitiveness. Despite vast disparities in governing philosophies and strategies, Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton all preached the virtues of free trade while continuing a policy of select protectionist actions.

As Conti...

Fifty years ago, the political whistle-stop tour was thus named because trains blew their whistles twice when making unscheduled stops in backwater towns. Like its distant cousin, the "electronic" whistle-stop brings the candidate's message directly to the people, but with one outstanding difference: the new whistle-stop offers politicians an accuracy, efficiency, and success at voter persuasian unimaginable to by earlier whistle-stoppers such as Harry Truman.

As Selnow shows, American political campaigns have an extraordinary affinity for electronic devices. They have seized upon...

Benoit, Blaney, and Pier apply the functional theory of political campaign discourse to the 1996 presidential campaign. When a citizen casts a vote, he or she makes a decision about which candidate is preferable. There are only three types of rhetorical strategies for persuading voters to believe a candidate is the better choice: acclaiming or self-praise, attacking or criticizing an opponent, and defending or responding to attacks. As they illustrate, acclaims, if accepted by the audience, make the candidate appear better. Attacks can make the opponent seem worse, improving the source's...