Language, Symbolism, and Politics

From the "telerhetoric" of 30-second "sound bites" that deliver campaign slogans to the legal rhetoric that shapes our notions of social roles and values, or the official rhetoric of bureaucracies that legitimizes social problems, our perceptions of political reality are determined by the language and symbolism of the institutions of our culture. In the words of Murray Edelman, we view politics as "a series of pictures in the mind, placed there by television news, newspapers, magazines, and...