Mass Media and American Politics

Doris A. Graber is professor emeritus of political science and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has written and edited numerous articles and books on the news media, public opinion, and information-processing. They include Media Power in Politics, Sixth Edition (2010), The Power of Communication: Managing Information in Public Organizations (2003), a prize-winning book about Processing Politics: Learning from Television in the Internet Age (2001), and On Media and Making Sense of Politics (2012), a comparative study of learning about politics from entertainment broadcasts.

Johanna Dunaway is associate professor of communication at Texas A&M University and a recent Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. She has written extensively on the relationship between the structural and contextual features of media outlets and election news content. Within this research program, she has examined news coverage of political campaigns, immigration, and events such as the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Her current research examines the impact of the changing media environment across individuals, communities, and the news industry. In addition to these primary research agendas, she has published in numerous other areas, including public opinion, political behavior, and political advertising. Her work appears in journals such as the Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Journal of Communication, Political Communication, Political Research Quarterly, Political Behavior, Journalism Studies and Social Science Quarterly.