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The field of communication has been working to reconcile its historic omission of race from research (Chakravartty et al., 2018) and pedagogy (Chakravartty and Jackson, 2020). The subfield of political communication has begun this process in its research (Freelon et al., 2023) but has yet to consider the implications of race missing from pedagogy. This essay offers an argument for including race in the political communication course, in the form of more focus on race in course content and more work by scholars of color. We offer reasons for these inclusions, ways for instructors to begin this incorporation, and what considerations instructors must be mindful of throughout the process.

This study examines how the New York Times covered a culturally significant event: the 2008 presidential election. A content analysis of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and their male counterparts examined coverage of “masculinized” and “feminized” issues and traits, and explicit novelty references. Analysis revealed that the Times promulgated stereotypic trends by providing heavy emphasis on women’s novelty, and more attention on masculinized content. Furthermore, a time-frame analysis showed that the Times gave men more issue and trait coverage than women as the primary and general election came to an end.

Personalization has cultivated a bad reputation in politics. Initially, scholarship on the personalization of politics focused on what was often called “candidate-centered” voting: the idea that citizens would vote based on a candidate's personality. Many scholars viewed this evaluative approach as irrational and heralded the value of issue stances over charisma (see Fenno 1978; Popkin 1991). Focusing on the personal, it seems, was problematic. Another iteration of the personalization in politics was also problematic and focused on the use of the “personal frame” in news coverage of women candidates. Such news coverage focused more on women's personalities and personal lives as compared to men's (e.g., Bystrom 1999; Devitt 1999). On its surface, such coverage does not appear detrimental. However, this framing would often emphasize women's roles as mothers and wives and use that framing to question women's experience, fitness for office, and whether they could juggle domestic and political responsibilities (Braden 1996). Personalization in both iterations elicited a sense of triviality: voters’ focus on persona was deemed as a trivial way to form an opinion, and women candidates were trivialized via a focus on their personal, not political, lives.

This study examined how Republican and Democratic candidates utilized Twitter to manage their impressions during the 2012 U.S. Senate elections, and examined their discussion of political issues and character traits across three types of tweets: campaign tweets, campaign-selected retweets, and tweets that mentioned their respective opponent. Candidates aligned with and trespassed party-based ownership of issues and traits across the tweet types. In the aggregate, Republicans discussed Republican-owned issues and traits more than Democrats, and Democrats emphasized Democrat-owned issues more than Republicans. This party alignment broke down when examined across winning and losing candidates, yielding varying routes to electoral success.

This study examines the intersection of journalist gender and campaign news coverage across legislative and executive political offices in a gender-prominent context: mixed-gender elections—those with at least one woman and one man. Based on a content analysis of U.S. newspaper coverage, this study focuses on “masculinized” and “feminized” political issues and character traits, and explicit references that highlight a candidate’s novelty. Results revealed no direct relationship between journalist gender and news coverage; however, when type of office was considered, there were significant shifts and differences in the focus of coverage by female and male journalists.

This dissertation examined how men and women candidates constructed their online self- presentations when running for U.S. Senate in 2012, and how such self-presentations impacted the public's perceptions of the candidates. Specifically, I employed a content analysis to examine how candidates communicated via their campaign Twitter accounts based on their gender and political party affiliation, and the gender and party affiliation of their opponent. As such, I analyzed tweets from 24 candidates running in 12 elections that featured male-versus-female, all- male, and all-female general elections, exploring their levels of interactivity and personalization, as well as their political issue and character trait emphases. Building on this analysis, I then implemented an experiment to examine the effects of personalized versus depersonalized tweets, in which personalized tweets connected campaign content to a personal aspect of the candidate. The experimental design also examined the effects of personalization across a candidate's gender and party affiliation. Overall, I found important differences across gender and political party in how candidates' Twitter communications emphasized my concepts of focus, and how the public evaluates personalized candidates. This work has several implications for our understanding of political communication, digital campaigning, and gender in American politics.

A decade ago, most U.S. journalists were following what they believed would be safe, predictable career paths at newspapers, magazines, TV stations, and radio stations. Their employers were among the most reliable of moneymakers. The techniques they used to tell stories were well established and well understood. Today, economics and technology are conspiring to reshape the environment in which journalists make news. Red ink has replaced black ink on the balance sheets of journalists' employers (Mutter, 2009). News staffs have been slashed (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010). Traditional mass media such as newspapers and broadcast TV stations are transforming themselves into \"platform-agnostic news organizations\" that want their journalists to understand how to communicate with print, audio, video, photography, and animation-often in the same story (Wilson, 2008).