Lexington Books
Pages: 278
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-1-4985-6029-0 • Hardback • December 2017 • $123.00 • (£95.00)
978-1-4985-6030-6 • eBook • December 2017 • $116.50 • (£90.00)
Robert E. Denton, Jr. holds the W. Thomas Rice Chair in the Pamplin College of Business and is professor and head of the Department of Communication at Virginia Tech.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: The 2016 Presidential Campaign Like No Other
Robert E. Denton, Jr.
Chapter 1: The Presidential Election of 2016: The Nomination Game
Henry Kenski and Kate Kenski
Chapter 2: Oh, the Places They’ll Go: The Geography and Political Strategy of Presidential Campaign Visits in 2016
Christopher J. Devine
Chapter 3: “I’m with Her:” The Impact of Gender Social Identification on Debate Perceptions and Effects
Freddie J. Jennings, Molly Greenwood, and Mitchell S. McKinney
Chapter 4: Taking Sides: WikiLeaks, the “Podesta Emails,” and the Media
Lyombe Eko and Christopher Hetherington
Chapter 5: The Age of Aggressive Apologia: Donald Trump’s Response to Lewd Video
Joseph M. Valenzano, III
Chapter 6: Media Bias and Alinsky’s Rules: Two Sides of Campaign Conventionality
Michele Rees Edwards and Terrence Warburton
Chapter 7: Slicing the 2016 Campaign News Pie: Front Page Election Coverage
Joan L. Conners
Chapter 8: #TeamGov: On the Political Experience, Campaign Messaging, and Electoral Performance of Johnson Weld 2016
Kyle C. Kopko and Christopher J. Devine
Chapter 9: We Are Not Amused: Authenticity as the Media Metaphor of @realDonaldTrump
Andrew C. Jones
Chapter 10: Fantasy Themes in Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign Announcement Speech and Audience Reaction
Hanisha Besant and Stephen D. Perry
Chapter 11: Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Concession Speech in the Context of an Evolving Genre
Theodore F. Sheckels
About the Contributors
Selected Bibliography
Index
The presidential election of 2016 represented an epistemological crisis for the traditional interpretive communities charged with understanding and forecasting political events in the United States. There is arguably no greater failure of prediction in the past 50 to 75 years or more with regard to the momentous election of an American president. Nearly all prognostication sources forecasted Hillary Clinton to defeat Donald Trump in election 2016. It is the situational crisis of this moment that makes Studies of Communication in the 2016 Presidential Campaign such an exceptional study in political communication that should be sought by all who are interested in understanding American politics. Studies of Communication in the 2016 Presidential Campaign gathers together a wide range of emerging and established scholars to provide powerful chapter based analysis of key aspects of the election that clarify how the experts could be so wrong. From presidential debates to social media, to gender and media bias, this book compiles solid academic insights about how this incredible political irony came to be and how we might anticipate future American politics from this point forward. Editor Dr. Robert Denton has a unique gift for bringing together a collection of experts uniquely suited to explain the nearly inexplicable. This book will stand as another strong testament to his prescient view over American politics that has been observable for many years.
— Ben Voth, associate professor, communication; director of speech and debate, Southern Methodist University; former advisor for the George W Bush institute, the Coolidge Presidential foundation and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC
Without dispute, the presidential campaign of 2016 was, by almost every metric available, a historic moment in American politics. There was scarcely an aspect of presidential political campaigning left unaffected or altered in some way. Studies of Communication in the 2016 Presidential Campaign offers an insightful look at many of those notable changes ranging from the nomination process to WikiLeaks to rhetorical analysis of key campaign speeches. For more than 25 years, Denton has coordinated and edited scholarly volumes on the presidential campaigns that provide readers with a much better understanding of the world’s best example of an ever-evolving democracy, and this volume is no different than those that precede it.
— John Allen Hendricks, Stephen F. Austin State University