ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part illustrates a range of studies of mass media understood as a foundation of political symbolizations and collective images in presidential campaigns. The relationships between mass media and the public sphere lead scholars interested in presidential campaigning into difficult, largely uncharted territory. The part explores relationships between the independent "debates" and voters' expectations of them. The debates over the debates fill newspaper and electronic commentary, and are signs that both the press and the citizenry are looking for more satisfying vehicles of political information during the late phase of the campaign. The part examines television coverage of campaigns. Television news increasingly has concentrated its resources on the fifty-three primaries and caucuses in the first half of the electoral year. The part provides an independent electronic medium playing highly significant roles of shaping and interpreting political electoral information for society.
