Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy

Rating:
Summary: Engaging Arguments
Review: As a professor of communication, I have enthusiastically used Kathleen Hall Jamieson's Dirty Politics as a text that makes sense of so much of what we see in nationally televised politics. Students invariably come away from reading Jamieson with a much deeper apprecation for politics--and what ails it. The strength of this text is in the attention to detail; specifically, Jamieson grounds her study in focus group research. And in those instances where she doesn't utilize such research, her readings of various televisual advertising is usually nuanced and insightful. The one drawback to the text, one that Jamieson would perhaps actually endorse, is its elitism; that is, only certain sorts of elites watch the Lehrer News Hour (to which she contributes frequently), and have the educational skills to do the hard work of argument, engagement and debate that she so heartily endorses. Politics isn't a spectator sport; in this text, Jamieson encourages us to get up off the couch and actually engage--and thereby hold candidates accountable for the discourse of Democracy.

Rating:
Summary: This book is badly written.
Review: Upon entering 1oth grade Honors Government and Economy, I was forced to read this book to enhance my summer project. Throughout reading this book I came to the conclusion that this was a poorly written book. Although Kathleen Hall Jamieson's book contains good thoughts, she uses an over-exceedingly amount of adjectives in the process of communicating her philosophies. However, despite my distaste for her writing, Kathleen Hall Jamieson's book, "Dirty Politics", contains valuable information and is a decent book for someone who enjoys researching the medias' influence on presidential campaigns.