Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 From the presidential race to the battle for the office of New York City mayor, American political candidates' approach to new media strategy is increasingly what makes or breaks their campaign. Targeted outreach on Facebook and Twitter, placement of a well-timed viral ad, and the ability to roll with the memes, flame wars, and downvotes that might spring from ordinary citizens' engagement with the issues-these skills are heralded as crucial for anyone hoping to get their views heard in a chaotic election cycle. But just how effective are the kinds of media strategies that American politicians employ? And what effect, if any, do citizen-created political media have on the tide of public opinion? In Controlling the Message, Farrar-Myers and Vaughn curate a series of case studies that use real-time original research from the 2012 election season to explore how politicians and ordinary citizens use and consume new media during political campaigns. Broken down into sections that examine new media strategy from the highest echelons of campaign management all the way down to passive citizen engagement with campaign issues in places like online comment forums, the book ultimately reveals that political messaging in today's diverse new media landscape is a fragile, unpredictable, and sometimes futile process. The result is a collection that both interprets important historical data from a watershed campaign season and also explains myriad approaches to political campaign media scholarship-an ideal volume for students, scholars, and political analysts alike.
Contents Part 1: Elite Utilization 1. Strategic Communication in a Networked Age 13 Daniel Kreiss and Creighton Welch 2. Congressional Campaigns' Motivations for Social Media Adoption 32 Girish J. Gulati and Christine B. Williams 3. Surrogates or Competitors? Social Media Use by Independent Political Actors 53 Julia R. Azari and Benjamin A. Stewart 4. The Competition to Control Campaign Messages on YouTube 74 Robert J. Klotz Part 2: Message Control in the New Media Environment 5. Campaign News in the Time of Twitter 93 Regina G. Lawrence 6. New and Traditional Media Reportage on Electoral Campaign Controversies 113 Mike Gruszczynski 7. Traditional Media, Social Media, and Different Presidential Campaign Messages 136 Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha Part 3: Social Media's Impact on Campaign Politics 8. The Influence of User-Controlled Messages on Candidate Evaluations 155 Joshua Hawthorne and Benjamin R. Warner 9. Terms of Engagement: Online Political Participation and the Impact on Offline Political Participation 181 Meredith Conroy, Jessica T. Feezell, and Mario Guerrero
