cover image White House to Your House: Media and Politics in Virtual America

White House to Your House: Media and Politics in Virtual America

Edwin Diamond. MIT Press (MA), $28 (178pp) ISBN 978-0-262-04150-8

``Modern technology has resuscitated a kind of Know-Nothing populism,'' warn the authors in their lucid but lightly sketched alert concerning the impact of ``politics-as-entertainment.'' They recount familiar tales from the 1992 presidential campaign--the blurring of hard and soft news (Larry King, etc.)--before surveying the decades-long effect of new forms of media on such campaigns. More usefully, they rue Bill Clinton's attempt to use ``pop media'' to foster governance, though they fear that media appetites for conflict over context might stymie any executive. The proliferation of media, they assert, can lead to dissemination of suspect information, as low-level media ratify innuendo (a la J. Edgar Hoover), which is then treated as a legitimate story. The authors discuss issues such as the role of ``handlers'' and flaws in polling before their unsurprising conclusion: no matter the medium, the most important issue is content. Diamond teaches journalism at New York University; Silverman is an editor of Interactive Age. (Nov.)