Thanks to the ready availability of political news today, informed citizens can protect and promote their own interests and the public interest more effectively. Or can they? Murray Edelman argues aga
Murray Edelman holds a unique and distinguished position in American political science. For decades one of the few serious scholars to question dominant rational-choice interpretations of politics, E
The Politics of Misinformation is an examination of how concentrations of social and economic power result in public languages of politics that are necessarily image-based, vague, and misleading in their denial of undemocratic tendencies. As a result, public discourses of democracy tend to be populistic, emotional, and likely to emphasize images of progress rather than structural inequalities in their formulations of public problems. Similarly, discourses of policy solutions to public problems emphasize assumptions about rationality in policy processes that are equally poor descriptions of most political outcomes. In short, neither typical problem definitions nor solutions invite critical popular understanding or involvement in democratic politics.
