Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC), has been named a Fall 2017 Fellow by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, based at Harvard Kennedy School.
Jamieson, a scholar of political communication and co-founder of FactCheck.org, will explore the role of the press in reinforcing norms of democratic discourse during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Among the issues Jamieson plans to examine are: identifying how and to what extent mainstream media covered uncivil campaign discourse that violated social norms, including tweets and remarks by campaign surrogates; the differences between partisan and legacy media coverage; the dilemmas reporters and editors confronted in deciding whether and how to cover breaches in civil discourse; and how boundary-crossing behavior was monitored by news editorials, endorsements, and reporting on people who disavowed that behavior.
Jamieson, the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, has authored or co-authored 15 books, including The Obama Victory and Spiral of Cynicism. She co-edited the recently published Oxford Handbook of Political Communication, in which she co-authored a chapter on “The Political Uses and Abuses of Civility and Incivility” (free access online for a limited time). She has extensively studied civility in Congress, and in 2016 delivered a TEDx talk on “The Decline of American Politics and How to Fix It.” She also co-edited the recently published Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication.
Other Joan Shorenstein Fellows this fall are Donna Brazile, the former Democratic National Committee interim chair; New Orleans freelance journalist Tyler Bridges, twice a member of Pulitzer Prize-winning teams; and Claes H. de Vreese, professor and chair of political communication in the Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam. Read the announcement here.
The Shorenstein Center also announced its visiting faculty for the fall, among them New York Times op-ed columnist and former editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal, who was a professional-in-residence at APPC during the spring 2017 semester.
Jamieson will be on a sabbatical from the University of Pennsylvania during the fall of 2017.
