The flow of themed sessions may change, especially depending on the availability of some of our guests from the outside. You'll meet, over the course of this semester, peoplewho work inside campaigns, people who cover campaigns, people who fashion advertising.

Assigments related to these sesions will be posted on this blog every week.

For now, the sessions go like this.

Sept. 15. What is a campaign? (See separate posting.) How campaigns have speeded up.
Sept. 22 What is/are the media? Who reads and watches what? What kind of shape are some of these media institutions in? How are some of the older media -- including cable TV --changing their missions?
Sept. 29 Who are the new players and how do they change the game? Politico and Huffington Post and some of other big web presences didn't even exist four years ago. But we'll also look at Wikipedia.
Oct. 6 Sex (roles) and the campaign. Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama and how they get covered.
Oct. 13 Humor. This was the year SNL, The Daily Show and the Colbert Report not only shaped coverage but attracted serious scruitny about the way they do that.
Oct. 20 Polls. How do they work? How do they get covered? What kind of coverage do they deserve?
Oct. 27 Advertising and fact checking of ads. Guest star: Ad guru Steve Wolfberg.
Nov. 3 Media Bias. We'll be talking about it all year long, but let's look hard at the specific charges.
Nov. 10. Election Recap.
Nov. 17 Race in the race. How did they cover it? And did it matter? Did anyone ever talk about ageism too?
Nov. 24 Talk radio, Fox news and the explicitly conservative media .
Dec. 1 What will 2012 be like, based on what we've seen this time? What will become more important? The information cloud?
Dec. 8. Final class. Heavy weeping.