The Press Effect; Politicians, Journalists, and the Stories That Shape the Political World

xvii, [3], 220 pages. Signed and dated by Jamieson on title page and just signed by Waldman on the title page. Lecture program where the authors discussed their book laid in. Includes Acknowledgment, Introduction, Conclusion, Notes, and Index. Chapters include The Press as Storyteller; The Press as Amateur Psychologist, Part I; The Press as Amateur Psychologist, Part II; The Press as Soothsayer; The Press as Shaper of Events; The Press as Patriot; and The Press as Custodian of Fact. How does the press fail us during presidential elections? Jamieson and Waldman show that when political campaigns side step or refuse to engage the facts of the opposing side, the press often fails to step into the void with the information citizens require to make sense of the political give-and-take. They look at the stories through which we understand political events--examining a number of fabrications that deceived the public about consequential governmental activies--and explore the ways in which political leaders and reporters select the language through which we talk and think about politics, and the relationship between the rhetoric of campaigns and the reality of governance. They explore the role of the campaigns and the press in the 2000 election, and ask whether in 2000 the press applied the same standards of truth-telling to both Bush and Gore. The events of election night and the thirty six days that followed revealed the role that preconceptions play in press interpretation and the importance of press frames in determining the tone of political coverage as well as the impact of overconfidence in polls. The Press Effect is, ultimately, a wide-ranging critique of the press's role in mediating between politicians and the citizens they are supposed to serve. Kathleen Hall Jamieson (born November 24, 1946) is an American professor of communication and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She co-founded FactCheckorg, and she is an author, most recently of Cyberwar. From 1971 to 1986, Jamieson served as a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland. She held the G. B. Dealey Regents Professorship while at the University of Texas from 1986 to 1989, served as the Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania from 1989 to 2003 and Director of its Annenberg Public Policy Center from 1993 to the present. Her research areas include political communication, rhetorical theory and criticism, studies of various forms of campaign communication, and the discourse of the presidency. Jamieson is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (since 2020), the American Philosophical Society (since 1997), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the International Communication Association. She is a distinguished scholar of the National Communication Association. Paul Waldman (born February 27, 1968) is a liberal/progressive American op-ed columnist and senior writer for The American Prospect, as well as a contributor to The Week. Waldman was formerly a senior researcher at the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: This fascinating, well documented and entertaining critique of the national press makes the case that the mainstream media doesn't so much report the news as create it, especially when journalists "transform the raw stuff of experience into presumed fact and arrange facts into coherent stories." University of Pennsylvania communications professor Jamieson and research fellow Waldman focus mainly on how the press reported the 2000 election, the Supreme Court's decision on the Florida vote and its response to national politics after 9/11. In each instance, they uncover and substantiate how the national press shapes the news. During the election, for instance, the press adapted a "frame" for each candidate, presenting Bush as "not too bright" a.…