Page 170 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

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also includes analysis of editorials and public opinion polls in Louisville and
Chicago to assess the impact of editorial endorsements. That study found issue
coverage meager but did not conclude that the coverage was biased in either
campaign in any of these media.
Advertising is part of presidential campaigns, too, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson
has contributed two important books in this area—Packaging the Presidency
and Dirty Politics. The former deals with criticism of presidential campaign
advertising. The latter is notable in that it offers some hope for the voter in
learning how to cope with the distortion created by campaign ads.
Sidney Kraus has compiled two important books about another aspect of
presidential campaigns—debates. The first was The Great Debates: Background,
Perspectives, Effects. It includes background about the staging of the debates,
but, more important, it reports on studies of the effects of the Kennedy-Nixon
debates. It is thus probably the largest collection of data on debate effects.
Televised Political Debates provides an overview of debates at a later date after
they have become established in the campaign routine.
There are, of course, political campaigns besides those for the presidency.
Not a great deal of research has been done on such campaigns, however. The
best is Covering Campaigns, by Peter Clarke and Susan H. Evans. It analyzes
newspaper coverage of 82 congressional races in the 1978 election and docu-
ments the advantage that incumbents have in such races.
Two books that look at aspects of campaigns other than coverage are The
Rise of Political Consultants, by Larry Sabato, and Candidates, Consultants and
Campaigns, by Frank I. Luntz. Both deal with the proliferation of consultants
in the last two decades and the implications of this for campaigns.
Political communication is about more than elections, and coverage of pres-
idents is a continuing process. The Press and the Presidency, by John W. Tebbel
and Sarah Miles Watts, traces presidential coverage through the years, showing
what happened in each presidency and how coverage has evolved.

In addition to books on media coverage, there are some important ones on
theory and research in the field. An early classic is The People's Choice, by
Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet. Better known as the
"Erie County study," this dealt with voter decision making in a bellwether Ohio
county in the 1940 presidential election. It concluded that media have little effect
on voters' choices. More recent works in the field have concluded otherwise,
and the reader might find it useful to consult the chapter by Steven H. Chaffee
and John L. Hochheimer in Mass Communication Review Yearbook, volume 5,
which places this study in the larger perspective of 40 years of research.
The Effects of Mass Communication, by Joseph Klapper, important as a major
compilation of early research in the field, also offered the conclusion that media
effects were minimal.
Agenda-setting research successfully challenged that point of view, and there
are several books we would suggest on that topic. One is Agenda Setting: Read-