Kathleen Hall Jamieson Quotes

#1. Spin' is a polite word for deception. Spinners mislead by means that range from subtle omissions to outright lies. Spin paints a false picture of reality by bending facts, mischaracterizing the words of others, ignoring or denying crucial evidence, or just 'spinning a yarn' - by making things up.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

#2. Women are quoted as sources and appear on interview shows much less frequently than men ... But the by-product of such anonymity may be immortality, for women are also less likely to find themselves written up on the obituary page.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

#3. Other problems confront women in power. One is fine but two's a crowd seems to be an unspoken rule when the one wears a skirt. And those in authority have found ways to reward women for excluding others of their kind.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

#4. Stories told around the water-cooler as well as statistics confirm that a man's competence is more likely to be presupposed, a woman's questioned.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

#5. The assumption that seeing is believing makes us susceptible to visual deception.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

#6. I think it's healthy to say that the American people now have direct access and that we have sufficient confidence as people in our own ability to judge, to make intelligent decisions.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

#7. The weakness in a model in which one assumes that the electorate gets what it needs from Bill Clinton is that our system doesn't institutionalize the oppositional voice, and one needs to be able to hear the exchange of the debate in order to create an informed electorate.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

#8. In politics as in life, what is known is not necessarily what is believed, what is shown is not necessarily what is seen, and what is said is not necessarily what is heard.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

#9. Presidents today spend more time speaking than they do reading or thinking.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

#10. Sisterhood is a powerful metaphor; it ought not become a synonym for groupthink.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

#11. Television has accustomed us to brief, intimate, telegraphic, visual, narrative messages. Candidates are learning to act, speak, and think in television's terms. In the process they are transforming speeches, debates, and their appearances in news into ads.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

#12. Increasingly, campaigns have become narcotics that blur our awareness of problems long enough to elect the lawmakers who must deal with them.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson