Echo Chamber by Kathleen Jamieson
Rupert Murdoch's recent multibillion-dollar purchase of the Wall Street Journal made international news. Yet it is but one more chapter in an untold story: the rise of an integrated conservative media machine that all began with Rush Limbaugh in the 1980s. Now Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella - two of the nation's foremost experts on politics and communications - offer a searching analysis of the conservative media establishment, from talk radio to Fox News to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Indeed, here is the first serious account of how the conservative media arose, what it consists of, and how it operates. To show how this influential segment of the media works, the authors examine the uproar that followed when Senator Trent Lott seemed to endorse Strom Thurmond's segregationist past. Limbaugh called the remarks "utterly indefensible," but added that a "double standard" was in play. That signaled a broad counterattack by the conservative media establishment, charging the mainstream media with hypocrisy (yet using its reports when convenient), creating a knowledge base (a set of facts or allegations for partisans to draw upon), and fostering an in-group identity. By analyzing such cases, together with survey data, Jamieson and Cappella find that Limbaugh, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal opinion pages create a self-protective enclave for conservatives, shielding them from other information sources, and promoting strongly negative associations with political opponents. Limbaugh in particular, they write, fuses the roles of party leader and opinion leader in a fashion reminiscent of the nineteenth century's partisan newspaper editors. The rise of conservative media has fundamentally changed American politics. This thoughtful study offers the most authoritative and insightful account of this revolutionary phenomenon available today.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson is Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania, Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and Program Director of the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands. She is the author or coauthor of fifteen books, including Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking, Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds Done in Words with Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, and Packaging the Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising and The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Message Shaped the 2008 Election with Bruce W. Hardy and Kate Kenski.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780195366822 |
| ISBN 10 | 0195366824 |
| Title | Echo Chamber |
| Author | Kathleen Jamieson |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press Inc |
| Year published | 2008-07-22 |
| Number of pages | 320 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |