POLITICAL COMMUNICATION
Unless otherwise noted, all biographies were written by Peter Simonson and Lauren Archer.
DORIS APPEL GRABER (1923 - ) grew up in a family that encouraged intellectual endeavors, so it's no surprise that Graber made her mark on the intellectual world in both communication research and political science. Even as a young girl, Graber hungered for intellectual stimulations. When her high school curriculum wasn't challenging her, she took an admissions test for Washington University in St. Louis, making her the youngest student on campus. As an undergraduate, she partly supported herself by reporting for local newspapers and hoped to one day incorporate this experience into her work. She earned both a B.A. And M.A. in political science from Washington University in St. Louis, but Graber’s intellectual curiosity still wasn't satisfied. She continued on to Columbia University where she studied international law and relations. After the death of her original advisor before she could defend her dissertation, she was forced to start over. However, Graber eventually earned her Ph.D. and her second dissertation was eventually published as
The Development of the Law of Belligerent Occupation, which became a legal reference for military men serving occupation duty.
The majority of Graber’s work focuses on political science but also reflects her interest in international law and relations, the politics of national development, the relationship between government and religious organization, and other national policy topics. Throughout her career, Graber approached her work through a variety of positions including as a journalist, researcher, teacher, editor, and officer for professional associations. As a journalist, Graber worked, as an undergraduate, as a feature writer for St Louis County Observer and later she wrote for the weekly paper
University City Tribune. After earning her Ph.D. she was placed in charge of two journals,
US Supreme Court Digest and
Legal Periodical Digest. Beyond her journalistic endeavors, Graber presented her research work on political communication in books, journal articles, and conference papers as well as through time spent as a research associate at the Center for the Study of American Foreign and Military Policy at the University of Chicago. Graber also taught at several universities including Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and North Park Hill. She began teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1970 and during her time there earned full professorship.
Graber has been central in establishing political communication as a respected and vibrant field of research. She takes an interdisciplinary perspective and uses a variety of methods including panel surveys, in-depth interviews, and content analysis. Her work has provided insights into the content of political communication as well as guidelines for continued study of political communication content. Currently she focuses on the elements of political communication through mass media, such as television, in order to understand how these messages are processed. Her book
Mass Media and American Politics (1993) remains one of her most influential works and a good example of her interdisciplinary approach as she mixes political science and media studies. Graber is also well known for her work on information processing, including her 1984 book
Processing the News: How People Tame the Information Tide in which she examines how people sort through and process information in newspapers and news shows. In
Media Agenda Setting in a Presidential Election (1981), Graber worked with David Weaver, Maxwell McCombs, and Chaim Eyal to systematically study the types of agenda setting. Other work has examined the prevalence of crime stories in the media, the effects of incumbency on presidential election reporting, and media framing.
Graber achieved her editorship experience through a variety of tasks including the periodicals mentioned earlier as well as by editing books. She served as a college textbook editor for Harper and Row for several years where she gained an appreciation for interdisciplinary approaches to scholarship. She was selected as the first editor of the journal
Political Communication and helped establish it's identity. Graber also made an effort to increase the presence on women in leadership positions within professional organizations as well as academic journals. She served as president of Midwest Political Science Association and Midwest Public Opinion Research as well as being the head of the Political Communication Division of ICA, just to name a few of her many positions in various organizations. She was recognized as an MAPOR fellow in 1988 and has also been given awards from the American Political Science Association including the Mentor Award in 1991 and the Edelman Career Award in 1992.
Graber’s numerous outstanding contributions have been recognized by several organizations including Harvard University, the National Science Foundation and her alma mater Washington University at St. Louis. She received the 2003 Goldsmith Award for best academic book on media and public policy and in 2006 the National Communication Association named her a Distinguished Scholar. She currently teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago but has also served as a visiting professor at several institutions, from Harvard University to Jiatong University. Graber's work helped shaped political communication research and continues to influence scholars working in that area.
Publications:
Books:
Graber, Doris. (1968).
The Development of the Law of Belligerent Occupation from 1863-1914: A Historical Survey. New York: AMS Press.
Graber, Doris. (1968).
Public Opinion, the President and Foreign Policy: Four Case Studies from the Formative Years. New York: Holt.
Graber, Doris. (1976).
Verbal Behavior and Politics. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Graber, Doris. (1980).
Crime news and the Public. New York: Praeger.
Graber, Doris, Ed.. (1982).
The President and the Public. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.
Graber, Doris. (1993).
Processing the news: How people tame the information tide. 2nd ed. New York: Longman. (Original work published 1988).
Graber, Doris. (1992).
Public Sector Communication: How Organizations Manage Information. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press.
Graber, Doris. (2009).
Mass media and American politics. (8th ed). Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press.
Weaver, David H., Graber, Doris A., McCombs, Maxwell, and Eyal, Chaim. (1993).
Media agenda setting in a presidential election: Issues, images and interests. New York: Praeger.
Graber, Doris. (2001P.
Processing politics: Learning from television in the Internet age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Graber, Doris, McQuail, Denis., and Norris, Pippa. (2008).
The Politics of news: The news of politics. (2nd ed.) Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press.
Graber, Doris. (2010).
Media Power in Politics. (6th ed.). Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press.
Graber, Doris. (2003).
The Power of Communication: Managing Information in Public Organizations. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press.
Articles:
Graber, Doris. (1976). Effects on incumbency patterns in 1972 presidential campaign.”
Journalism Quarterly, 53, 499-508.
Graber, Doris. (1976). Press and television as opinion resources in presidential campaigns.
Public Opinion Quarterly 40, 285-303.
Graber, Doris. (1978). Agenda-setting Are there's women's perspectives? In L. K. Epstein (Ed.),
Women and the News (15-37). New York: Hastings.
Graber, Doris. (1979). Is crime news coverage excessive?
Journal of Communication 29, 81-92.
Graber, Doris. (1983). Hoopla and horse-race in 1980 campaign coverage: A closer look. In I W. Schulz et. al. (Ed.)
Mass Media and elections in democratic societies. Munchen: Olschlager.
Graber, Doris. (1985). Approaches to content analysis of television news programs.
Communications 11: 25-36.
Graber, Doris. (1990). Seeing is remembering: How visuals contribute to learning from television news.
Journal of Communication 40: 134-155.
Graber, Doris. (1993). Political communication: Scope, progress, promise. In A. Finifter (Ed.),
The state of the discipline II, (305-332). Washington, D.C.: American Political Science Association.
Additional Resources:
McLeod, Douglas M. (1996). “Doris Appel Graber,” In Nancy Signorelli (Ed.),
Women In Communication: A Biographical Sourcebook (162-172). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
University of Illinois at Chicago faculty page:
http://www.uic.edu/depts/pols//faculty/dorisgraber.html