ABSTRACT
This book appears at a time of increasing concern about the ways politics is communicated to the public. Such concerns have been expressed by media researchers and other academics engaged in the study of politics, as well as by some media professionals and politicians both in the US and in Britain (the two countries whose political communication systems we have followed most closely) and elsewhere, in many other liberal-democratic societies. It would be no exaggeration to describe this state of affairs as a crisis of civic communication.1
