Barack Obama's stunning victory in the 2008 presidential election will go down as one of the more pivotal in American history. Given America's legacy of racism, how could a relatively untested first-term senator with an African father defeat some of the giants of American politics?

In The Obama Victory, Kate Kenski, Bruce Hardy, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson draw upon the best voter data available, The National Annenberg Election Survey, as well as interviews with key advisors to each campaign, to illuminate how media, money, and messages shaped the 2008 election. They explain how...

The scholarly field of political communication emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, amidst the turmoil of two world wars and the emergence of film, radio, and-eventually-television. As a subject of inquiry, political communication is interdisciplinary by its very nature, bridging rhetoric, public opinion, political behavior, political psychology, journalism, media studies, and telecommunications.

In The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication, Kate Kenski and Kathleen Hall Jamieson bring together a diverse cast of leading scholars in the field, including some of...