Campaign '96: A Functional Analysis of Acclaiming, Attacking and Defending (review)

126 Rhetoric & Public Affairs access to new technologies by citizens, and a means for political actors to bypass news organizations when they communicate with the public. Governing with the News represents a substantial contribution to the way scholars think about news organizations. EspeciaUy important are the issues of capacity and accountability. Mass media, organized in America to treat individuals as consumers rather than citizens, are clearly not up to the task of providing a clear channel of communication between government officials and the public. Cook notes that journalists claim to act as surrogates for their audience. However, there is strong evidence that when given the opportunity citizens, compared to journalists, seek substantiaUy different types of information from government officials. A good companion volume for Cook's volume is Who Deliberates? by Benjamin Page. Page describes a number of instances where mediated deliberation works badly for democracy. Cook raises numerous concerns regarding mass mediated deliberation that need to be addressed by media scholars and democratic theorists. James M. Carlson Providence College Campaign '96: A Functional Analysis of Acclaiming, Attacking and Defending. By WiUiam L. Benoit, Joseph R. Blaney, and P. M. Pier. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998; pp, xviii + 264. $59.95. This book examines campaign communications in the 1996 presidential election . The communications serve as the dependent variable. Independent variables include the message form, the candidates, their parties, and the stage of the campaign in which the communication occurred. The authors employ a functional analysis. Three primary communication goals, acclaiming (pointing to one's own accomplishments), attacking (criticizing opposing candidates' policy positions, character, and/or behavior) and defending (responding to the charges of others) are assessed. These goals form the categories into which the content of the various forms of campaign discourse, debates, television advertisements, talk radio, major convention addresses, and free (non-paid) television remarks are placed and then analyzed using descriptive statistics. InitiaUy, one wonders why the authors chose to dissect the anatomy of a relatively uninteresting election; and why they utilize a case study methodology which obviously limits the generalizabüity of their findings. By the end of this book, the answers are clear. The authors have done an in-depth analysis in order to demonstrate that multiple factors potentiaUy can affect campaign communications— hence the need to study these factors systematicaUy before generalizing about the whys of campaign communications. Even though the findings are case specific, they do suggest that some of the conventional wisdom is, at the very least, overstated and may, depending upon more Book Reviews 127 case analyses of this type, be wrong. For example, the authors found that the candidates placed greater emphasis acclaiming their own positive qualities than in attacking their opponents' negative ones, just about twice as much (211). There was much more attention given to policy in candidate communications than to issues of personal character, 72 percent compared to 28 percent (213). Republicans were more negative than Democrats in 1996. This negativity may not be surprising in light of the fact that the Democrats controUed the White House and the GOP did not. Also not unexpectedly, Republicans focused more on character issues than did the Democrats. Of course, it was the ethical and moral compass of the Clinton administration that was of issue, particularly to the sociaUy conservative Republican rank-and-file. AdditionaUy, the more attack-oriented Republican communications might also be reflective of that party's competitive nomination process in which Republicans attacked Republicans whereas Clinton ran unopposed. Of aU the communications, the television spots were the most negative and the candidates in their speeches and debates most laudatory—of themselves naturaUy (214-215). Television spots also had a larger character component than did speeches and talk radio which were more policy oriented (218). With the exception of Clinton's discourse in the debates, there were relatively few communications of a defensive nature. More interesting than these findings, however, was the methodology. The authors examined each message independently. Every coding decision was agreed to by two of the authors, thereby resulting in 100 percent coder reliabüity. Moreover, the breakdown of the communications into types and by campaign stages enabled the authors to note the varying effects of message...