Kathleen Hall Jamieson is one of the nation’s leading experts in the field of political communication, including news coverage of elections, political parties and candidates, and presidential campaigns. Her work has focused on what people know about politics, how the media portray political phenomena, and how these processes affect public policy. Professor Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kathleen Jamieson’s prolific publication record includes books such as Packaging the Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Advertising (Oxford University Press, 1984), Eloquence in an Electronic Age (Oxford University Press, 1988), Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and the Public Good (Oxford University Press, 1997), unspun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation (Random House, 2007), Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds Done in Words (University of Chicago Press, 2008), Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (Oxford University Press, 2008), and The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Messages Shaped the 2008 Election (Oxford University Press, 2010). Several of these books have received political science or communication book awards, including the 2010 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in the area of government and politics. In addition, she has published extensively in some of the most prestigious journals in the field. Her paper “Implications of the Demise of ‘Fact’ in Political Discourse” received the American Philosophical Society’s 2016 Henry Allen Moe Prize. Professor Jamieson has also written dozens of Op Ed pieces for some of the most prestigious national media outlets, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN.

Kathleen Jamieson’s work has been funded by the FDA and the MacArthur, Ford, Carnegie, Pew, Robert Wood Jackson, Packard, and Annenberg Foundations. In addition, she is the co-founder of FactCheck.org and its subsidiary site, SciCheck, and is director of The Sunnylands Constitution Project, which has produced more than 30 award-winning films on the Constitution for high school students. Her work has also had an impact on media professionals covering elections. For example, based on her adwatch effects studies in the 1990s, the Annenberg Center distributed booklets and videos to television newsrooms demonstrating how to visually report news stories that debunk false or misleading campaign ads so that the viewers would correctly process the information in the news report.

Professor Jamieson has delivered the American Political Science Association’s Ithiel de Sola Poole Lecture, the National Communication Association’s Arnold Lecture, and the NASEM Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education Henry and Bryna David Lecture. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the International Communication Association, and a past president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.