Architects of Communication Scholarship

Ellen Wartella 00:02
ICA Presents

Ellen Wartella 00:11
Hello! Welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. I’m Ellen Wartella. Today, we’re hearing from Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Dr. Jamieson is currently the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication of the Annenberg School for Communication and the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, both at the University of Pennsylvania. After receiving degrees from Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jamieson started as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland in 1971. Her career has taken her to the University of Texas, where she served as the G.B. Dealey Regents Professor of Communication and Chair of the Speech Communication Department, to the University of Pennsylvania, where she served as the Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, to Capitol Hill as the Director of Communication for the House Committee on Aging. Over the course of her career, Dr. Jamieson has authored or co-authored 17 books, including the acclaimed Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President in 2018 and The Obama Victory in 2010. She’s won the R.R. Hawkins Award, the PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers, among other honors, for her writing. She’s also a celebrated trailblazer for women in the field of communication science, having won the Women in Communications Hale Lifetime Achievement Award and been named a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania by The Pennsylvania Commission for Women. Our interviewer today is Dr. Kate Kenski, a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Arizona. Dr. Kenski specializes in political communication, public opinion, and research methods, and was previously at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania — she has worked with Dr. Jamieson on several occasions. Here’s Kate.

Kate Kenski 02:01
I'd like to begin by asking you about your beginnings as a scholar. When did you realize that you wanted to choose teaching and research as a career path? And what steps did you take to make that happen?

Kathleen Jamieson 02:23
I didn't actually think I would wind up in the professoriate.When I was an undergraduate, I was applying to go to law school, it was a reasonable career track for someone who was an undergraduate debater. I was majoring in rhetoric and public address and taking a lot of philosophy courses, and looked at the possibility of graduate school in philosophy. My advisor in philosophy said, “There will be no jobs for women in philosophy, you could be the best in the nation, it's a sexist field. If you're going to be an academic, go into something else.” And I said, “Well, I'm probably going to go to law school.” Then, went to visit law schools in my junior year, and realized that I didn't want to go to law school. And having talked to my philosophy advisor about going to philosophy graduate school, and getting the advice from him that I would be better off in the field I was actually working in — it was then called speech communication. He said “You'll be able to do everything you could do in philosophy in the rhetoric field, because the rhetoric field and philosophy are so closely enjoined, but there are jobs there, and they're much less sexist.” And so a Jesuit priest gave me the suggestion to apply to grad school in communication. I applied to the University of Wisconsin, they said yes, gave me a fellowship, and everything followed from that.

Kate Kenski 03:31
Where did you go to undergraduate?

Kathleen Jamieson 03:34
Marquette University on a debate scholarship. I was a high school debater, and the scholarship was irresistible. I was Catholic by background; wanted to be at a Jesuit institution if possible. And Jesuits had very early just started giving scholarships to both men and women. So they gave me a full tuition scholarship, they paid my room and board, and in return, I was a debater for them.

Kate Kenski 03:55
Why did you decide to go that route as opposed to law school?

Kathleen Jamieson 04:00
When I went to the various law schools, and law schools were just opening up for women at that point. So they were starting to recruit actively, and they were in particular looking for women who had been varsity debaters, because the skill set is a comparable skill set. I went to a number of major law schools as part of debate because we're debating all over the country. So, I would just stop in early. They'd sent me letters asking me to come and visit etc., because I had high test scores. And I was on the debate circuit, and they were looking for women. And basically sat in on the classes and didn't like the rote recitation process that I saw as the educational mode in the law schools that I visited. The processes that I saw in place were very adversarial — reminded me of Catholic Catechism. So, somebody gets pointed by the professor, "And what is the nature of this case?" And the person was supposed to stand up and recite, and I thought, why do I want to memorize all that stuff? There actually are books and I would learn what I needed to if I had a case in front of me, but it didn't seem to me to be a particularly worthwhile way to be educated.

Kate Kenski 05:03
While in graduate school, who else was influential to you during that period of time?

Kathleen Jamieson 05:09
The University of Wisconsin-Madison was a young program. That is, the professoriate there was young. So, the program had this sense of dynamism, the field had the sense that it was churning, it was an exciting area. So, I basically took all the courses they required me to take , but the courses I particularly enjoyed were those with Black, with Lloyd Bitzer, and with Fred Williams, and with Gordon Whiting. Wisconsin had an important philosophy that required that you master the quantitative track and take courses outside your area of rhetoric in what was then called communication theory. And what I realized in the process was the amount of really interesting, important work that would synergize with what I wanted to learn about rhetoric. And so I was working for my doctoral dissertation on how the Catholic papacy came to the rhetoric that it ultimately used in the birth control encyclical Humanae Vitae — an encyclical that maladapted to the modern world. That's the encyclical that puts in place the ban on birth control, what the encyclical calls artificial birth control. And I was trying to understand how long lived institutions come to conventionalized language and structures of discourse that become tenacious in their hold on the institution, as the society migrates away from those assumptions.So, from the very earliest moves that I was making, as a scholar, I was benefiting because the University of Wisconsin insisted that we were going to learn about those other ways of knowing about communication. And the other piece of the Wisconsin education that I’ve valued to this day, is that by insisting that we not simply learn qualitative methods, that we also learn quantitative methods. They made it possible for me to work with people who would be better trained in those areas than I, to answer questions that I could not answer solely from the methods that I commanded. There's a piece of my Wisconsin background that is important in retrospect — there were no women on the faculty when I was going through graduate school, but there had been a woman on Wisconsin faculty before in my generation came in. Her name is Gladys Borchers. And she donated to the school a lecture fund, in which she asked them to bring in young women scholars in order to give them a footing inside the field of communication. And so I went back to give the Gladys Borchers lecture after I got my PhD and had a chance to meet Gladys Borchers, I'd never met her before. She'd been part of that generation that came into the academy through the speech field very early in the history of our field, at a time in which women could not be married and in the professoriate. And she took me out to dinner. And I've had a wonderful evening with this incredible woman, who helped found the department that I'd learned and at that point had my PhD, and learned and surprised that I hadn't known it; that basically women were forced to choose if you wanted to get married, you had to give up the professoriate. And she chose to stay in the professoriate and gave up being married, having children, all those kinds of things that of course, at that point I had been able to choose and be in the professoriate. And it was one of those moments of realization about how far we had come and yet how far we still had to go.But, I remember that conversation as if it happened yesterday, because it was such a moment of awareness to me of what she had sacrificed, and also what she realized about the needs of the professoriate. And I loved her for that. It was one of those wonderful moments in which you say - we are the beneficiaries that a whole other generation that is trying to break paths forward for us too, and we need to be doing the same.

Kate Kenski 08:39
What kind of pressures did you feel when you had gotten your doctorate, and you were looking for jobs? And did you feel constrained by that, despite the progress that had been made by your department?

Kathleen Jamieson 08:53
The field was expanding when I came with a PhD in 1970. So, there are a lot of jobs. The problem for me was that I'd married a guy who wanted to live in Washington, DC, because he wanted to work for the Navy Department. And so my constraint was, if I wanted to live with this guy I'd married and whose children I was about to have, I needed to look for jobs in the Washington market. But the job market wasn't a constricted job market when I came out. And I had a well known advisor, I came out of a well known program, and departments were starting to be aware that their faculties weren't diverse, and by not diverse, they meant they didn't have many women. They had virtually no women of color and no people of color. But, the challenge at that point was just trying to increase the gender balance, to rectify the gender imbalance. And so I looked at the job market inside the Washington DC area, and kept watching for jobs — a job opened at the University of Maryland. It looked a lot like something I was qualified to do. I applied. They interviewed me, they said they wanted to offer me the job, I wanted to see the department chairman, he's making the job offer. And I said, “By the way, I'll have to take a couple of days off in the fall, because I'm pregnant, and I'll be delivering in fall, but I'll make sure my classes are covered.” And he stood up and said, “We don't hire pregnant women.” So he withdrew the offer. There was no protection at that point for pregnancy discrimination. And so I stood up and said something that made no sense. But it was the only thing I could think of to say, which is well, “I don't want to be hired by people who don't hire pregnant women,” and so I thanked him and left. A year later, they reopened the position. There was a new department chair, the University of Maryland was being told because of some sex discrimination suits it was experiencing that perhaps it would be a good idea if it broadened its search a little bit to include women who might be of childbearing age and planning to have children. And the offer that was made the second time around to me again, I said, “I'm going to have more children, I'd already had the first child.” And they said, “That's fine. We love children.” Yep. So, I was right in the middle of a transition in which the women's movement was starting to create pressure on universities to create an environment in which it was possible for women to be mothers and to be in the professoriate, and I was the beneficiary of that movement.

Kate Kenski 10:59
What drew you to the University of Texas at Austin?

Kathleen Jamieson 11:03
The University of Texas had assembled the best combination of Presidential Scholars anywhere in the country across the campus. I was very interested in taking what I knew about long lived institutions, and trying to see if I could overlay it on the presidency. And I'd started writing about presidential campaign advertising. My first academic book was on Packaging the Presidency. Hence, I was pulling a lot of presidential scholarship together. And I was starting to try to look at how presidential rhetoric was functioning, because I was working with Karlyn Campbell on starting to get ready to put together a book that would focus on genres of discourse in the presidency, and looking for more people to talk with. So, what attracted me to Texas was this amazing combination of scholars. It was a wonderful move to be with wonderful people.

Kate Kenski 11:49
So it sounds like early on when you were interested in papal rhetoric, part of that was driven for political reasons behind what the Papacy was doing. How did you make that jump from that to being interested in the presidency, specifically?

Kathleen Jamieson 12:04
The practical answer to your question is, the job at the University of Maryland said, “We want someone to teach political communication.” I had worked in politics, I had been “clean for Gene.” I was part of the movement to try to unseat Lyndon Johnson as president in the Wisconsin primary in 1968. Now, Eugene McCarthy then didn't win the nomination and the presidency, but I was “clean for Gene.” I had on-the-ground political experience and in the process, I'd actually created some advertising. I was a political junkie, in other words. So, I had some practical political experience. When I was interviewed at the University of Maryland, both times I said the same thing when they said, “But, you're not really trained in political communication.” I said, “I study long lived institutions that have more political intrigue than the United States presidency ever has.” I've been studying political communication all my life.” So, for practical purposes, I shifted to the presidency as the second institution, in part because the job that I wanted to get, because I was constrained in the areas I could search to be within a commuting distance of the Washington market. And then started developing coursework that pushed me toward getting my first academic book done. Packaging the Presidency is written out of my course notes to teach an introductory political communication course at the University of Maryland.

Kate Kenski 13:17
Which of your books do you feel has made the biggest impact?

Kathleen Jamieson 13:22
If you ask the question from an external standpoint, and you say, “Well, which book has gotten the most recognition? It's the book that I did with you and Bruce Hardy, it's Obama Victory, which won not simply awards across the communication field, but it won the PROSE Award from the American Publishers Association. So, that's recognition outside our field of a book from our field, and I'm very proud of that. I'm very proud of Cyber War, because Cyber War makes the argument that Russian trolls and hackers helped elect Donald Trump. I believe they did. So, I'm proud of that book, because I think it made an historically important statement. I'm also proud of that, because it's the first time anybody in our field has ever won the Hawkins prize, which is the highest honor that the American Publishers Association gives for an academic book. My favorite book is actually it's a tie, it's either Beyond the Double Bind: Women in Leadership, or it's Eloquence in an Electronic Age.

Kate Kenski 14:13
Let's talk about the Double Bind. that is a book that certainly makes an important statement about the constraints placed on women, and hopefully, is more positive in terms of,possible ways of breaking them. What impact do you feel that that made, and what did you enjoy about creating that book?

Kathleen Jamieson 14:29
Well, first, it didn't make the impact I hoped it would. Susan Faludi had written Backlash. That book had traction, that book was a bestseller. That book was wrong. If one wants to say how do you disempower women, read that book. I was so angry by the time I got to the third chapter, because I wanted to say, “That's not true.” You can make and hold gains. Disadvantaged groups can make and hold gains. That's in fact, the assumption we have to make if we're going to keep trying to make those gains. And what I argued in the book, in the book it sets up paradigms that say, “We create double binds for women societally, and those who want to hold them back create binds from society, that they can transcend.” But, part of the way they transcend is meta communicating about the existence of the bind. It was an attempt to say that there's a rhetorical construct operating in the Faludi book that's problematic for women, and there's a rhetorical move that you can make that gets you out of the trap that's been set by that book. Some of the arguments that she was making for women being pushed back when you actually look at the facts, that she had her history wrong. So, the part of me that would found FactCheck.org, with Brooks Jackson was reacting to that saying, “No, that wasn't the order of those cases happened in.” There's a second piece of it that I think is important. I think that book still has resonance. That is, I think those binds are still at play. Beyond the Double Bind says, “These are binds; they're placed on women.” I was hoping by now I'd be able to say, “...and they don't exist anymore.” Well, they still exist anymore. They still, are there to trap women. I think that's why the book continues to get cited and read. And I'm sorry to say that. And by the way, some of those binds are specific to women of color, who have to navigate a double double bind. I interviewed pages of women in leadership positions, right Beyond the Double Bind, and in the process, drew a large amount of the insight in that book out of the actual experiences of women who at that moment, were navigating the binds. Many of those went on to become senators, governors, presidents of universities. So, it was fun to hear them at that moment in their careers, and then watch them as they demonstrated, you can transcend them, because they moved into those leadership positions.

Kate Kenski 17:13
Thinking about your work as a public scholar — which of your works, would you say put you on the path to be someone who's widely recognized outside of academia? What steps did you take and was that an active choice?

Kathleen Jamieson 17:26
It wasn't an active choice. I was at the University of Maryland, so in the Washington market. I took a sabbatical in order to test a theory about how the press worked by working on The Hill. So I worked for Claude Pepper. He was the chair of the House Committee on Aging, and I headed his communication operation. I managed the communication strategy for the House Committee on Aging, for the bill that extended protection for mandatory retirement to the age of 70. So, I became knowledgeable about the issue, and I was his spokesperson. I also wrote all of his speeches. I was dealing with the press on his behalf, and I was writing speeches for him. So, there'd be times in which I’d get a press query for him, I would check with him. He would say, “Kathleen, just say anything you think I should say.”And I set up the communication structures that we as a committee were using. So I was briefing both the Republicans and the Democrats on the issue, and in the process, getting to know a whole lot of wonderful people on the Hill. At one point, David Broder wrote a piece for the Washington Post. He basically was attacking the bill that I was advancing as the communication director, And I said to Senator Pepper, “Should I respond to this in your voice or in my voice?” And he said, “I think this one needs an academic, rather than a member of Congress.” Now, this is this person in his early 80s, saying to me, “Why don't you be you when you respond to this?” And I said, “Okay, I'll write something that is not from you.” Wrote this thing and got back a lovely response from Broder and thought, okay, there is a voice that is my voice that can talk into that sphere as well. So, my first experience as a public communicator was not communicating as me, it was communicating as Pepper, and then having him say, “No.” And when I was doing the briefings as well, I would brief in my own voice, The “Morning Edition” show was just coming into its own, it had just been developed at NPR . Larry Lichty, who was a professor at the University of Wisconsin when I was at Wisconsin, although I never took his courses there. He said to them,“Kathleen Jamieson is on our faculty, and she's really smart and interesting. Why don't you give her a weekly slot?” So, they gave me a weekly slot. They gave me a little try out. Once a week for I think it was three years. Now I'm in public intellectual space. So when Packaging the Presidency comes out in '84, they already know who I am. And now people are starting to take political advertising seriously. So suddenly, I was a go-to on political advertising, but they also knew me as a person who had been a voice on National Public Radio, and there I’m commenting about speeches. I'm commenting about anything that is communication. So Packaging the Presidency actually launched me into a space in which I was in at that point, what they were calling the Rolodex for reporters. I became a person they called when they wanted to get answers to questions about political communication. So, it wasn't one of those moments where I woke up and said, I'd like to do this. It was pure happenstance and a whole lot of really generous people.

Kate Kenski 20:17
Would you say there are any particular pieces you've done where your sources of inspiration have been theory, or has it been things of the moment that almost needed someone to study because of their empirical impacts on the greater society?

Kathleen Jamieson 20:32
The thing I've taken the most pride in is co-founding FactCheck.org. FactCheck.org comes out of the back end of Packaging the Presidency, which has a series of hypotheses. Dirty Politics is written out of some of the background and the back end of Packaging the Presidency. Dirty Politics is beginning to engage questions about whether or not the journalistic community has obligations to engage on accuracy motivations. So, whether it's to try to increase the likelihood that we have accuracy motivations on the part of the electorate, and whether it should adjudicate conflicts over statements of fact, when political leaders are making them. With that as the backdrop, what prompted that it was, oh, politicians appear to deceive sometimes. Do they get away with it? When they get away with it, why do they get away with it, and how can we minimize the likelihood that they're going to get away with it? David Broder heard me speaking about this concern that I had. I was at one of these post-election things that every university has, after ‘88, saying the press defaulted, and this is not about who should have won, but there were factual errors being put forward in the advertising that were never adjudicated in a way that let the public make a good decision about what they could know. And they might still vote exactly the way they were going to otherwise, but they should have known that when they cast their votes, and that's a press fault. Of all the things I've done in my career, that's what I'm proudest of. It's that trajectory of things that led to FactCheck.org. I then founded FactCheck.org, on the back end of all of this in 2003. When Brooks Jackson was leaving CNN I thought the end of fact checking. So, I hired him at the Policy Center to start FactCheck.org with me, and that's what I'm proudest of in my entire academic career. It helped found the fact checking movement about political discourse in the United States.

Kate Kenski 22:11
As a younger discipline in the social sciences, I feel like communication as a discipline is often either misunderstood, or ignored when it comes to people within universities, or even people in the wider public. My question is, When we think about what the field needs to do, what have members of the field of communication done well, to get out what communication does, and where have they failed and what do they need to do so that the wider community can see what communication has to offer in terms of public knowledge?

Kathleen Jamieson 22:45
I actually think communication has a bigger place at the table than most people in the communication field think it does. We could increase the likelihood that people would know that the field as a whole is making these kinds of contributions. If the field itself would be more likely to be seen and heard in other disciplinary space, making its perspective distinctively known from that in other disciplinary space. The reality is comm is a relatively small field. We teach a lot of students, but we're still a relatively small field. We're also a relatively young field, this field just started producing books in the 1980s. The number of books that are now coming out of the field is extremely high compared to where it once was.Every time one of our scholars is on a plenary stage at a larger disciplines convention, and making points that are distinctively clearly communication driven, and unique and significant, we established the importance of it and established that there is a way of knowing here that complements and is distinct from the other voices, to the extent that we're simply mimicking the other fields and doing exactly the same kind of research, there's no reason for us to have standing that is different. So, if we can't make an argument for something we distinctively know, we don't deserve the national attention. If we can't make the case for its contribution, we don't deserve the national attention. And with that, I think we are at the end of our time, and Kate, thank you so much. It's just a pleasure to talk with you.

Kate Kenski 24:06
I wish I could have asked more questions, but we will have to put that off for another time. Thank you for letting me be a part of this.

Kathleen Jamieson 24:14
It's a pleasure.

Ellen Wartella 24:16
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association and is sponsored by The School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. This episode is produced by Lucia Barnum and Bennett Pack. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. Our production consultant is Nick Song. The theme music is by Humans Win . For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai