Murray Edelman – författare

Thanks to the ready availability of political news today, informed citizens can protect and promote their own interests and the public interest more effectively. Or can they? Murray Edelman argues against this conventional interpretation of politics, one that takes for granted that we live in a world of facts and that people react rationally to the facts they know. In doing so, he explores in detail the ways in which the conspicuous aspects of the political scene are interpretations that systematically buttress established inequalities and interpretations already dominant political ideologies.

In this book, Murray Edelman continues his quest to understand the influence of perception on the political process by turning to the role of art. He argues that political ideas, language, and actions cannot help but be based upon the images and narratives we take from literature, paintings, film, television, and other genres. Edelman believes art provides us with models, scenarios, narratives, and images we draw upon in order to make sense of political events, and he explores the different ways art can shape political perceptions and actions to both promote and inhibit diversity and democracy.

The symbolic manifestations, purposes, and uses of politics are revealed in this provocative analysis of the institution of politics and man as a political animal. Unlike the conventional study of politics that deals with how people get the things they want through government, this book concentrates on how politics influence what they want, what they fear, and what they regard as possible. In examining politics as a symbolic form, it looks at man and politics as reflections of each other.

The Politics of Misinformation is an examination of how concentrations of social and economic power result in public languages of politics that are necessarily image-based, vague, and misleading in their denial of undemocratic tendencies. As a result, public discourses of democracy tend to be populistic, emotional, and likely to emphasize images of progress rather than structural inequalities in their formulations of public problems. Similarly, discourses of policy solutions to public problems emphasize assumptions about rationality in policy processes that are equally poor descriptions of most political outcomes. In short, neither typical problem definitions nor solutions invite critical popular understanding or involvement in democratic politics.