Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Campaign Misinformation | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: There’s the notion that discourse can either ennoble you and increase your capacity for reflection and judgment or it can demean you and constrict your ability to make good judgments and make thoughtful judgments. And across the years we’ve increasingly moved to a kind of campaign structure that makes it harder to thoughtfully consider alternatives, to give the candidates the space to lay out alternatives thoughtfully.

And increasingly we’ve rewarded candidates who have deceived and taken words out of context and campaigned in ways that made it impossible for them to govern well. We’ve got to try to find a way to fix this. We’re at a very, very critical time right now.

Politics is badly broken …

Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Campaign Misinformation | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

I keep pulling out quotes. Go see the video and/or read the transcript.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Campaign Misinformation | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

BILL MOYERS: What does it say about democracy when you do get locked into a mindset that, that responds in no positive way to the facts and to reality?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: … My sense of many past elections was that the party eventually nominated a person who paid a role in telling the party what it was. They helped frame the platform, they then run on the platform.

In this case I think the candidates are trying to align themselves to — on the Republican side — the conservative base instead of telling Republicans where the party should be they’re trying to tell people that they are conservative where the conservatives are. And I think that’s what Romney is saying with his strange statement that he’s severely conservative as Governor.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Campaign Misinformation | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com