Picture Perfect: The Art and Artifice of Public Image Making

This disjointed narrative mixes an analysis of photography and the movies with a comparison of television coverage of the 1968 and 1988 presidential campaigns. Freelance writer Adatto interviewed numerous television journalists to show how image-making has supplanted hard issues as a topic for coverage and how media advisers have become a new pundit class. Her discussion of journalistic self-criticism suffers, however, from her concentration on 1988, not 1992. She then ranges afield, finding the roots of ``picture-centured journalism'' in newspaper photography of the 19th century and tracing current consciousness of images to movies and photographs that saw the television set as part of the ``social landscape.'' The lengthy concluding chapter summarizes portrayals of heroes in a range of American movies; in an epilogue, Adatto suggests that politicians seek to embrace the image of the maverick movie hero. Photos not seen by Publishers Weekly. (Apr.)