Reddit reviews Constructing the Political Spectacle

I'll take number 4.

My favorite intro book on media and politics is Media Politics: A Citizen's Guide by Shanto Iyengar. It's a great textbook for teaching undergrads and covers pretty much everything.

For general theories of how political elites interact with the media, I would recommend Cook's Governing with the News, Patterson's Out of Order, and Zaller's A Theory of Media Politics (It's an unpublished manuscript, so just Google it and it'll come up.)

There's a ton of great work on the concept of media bias, but I'll give you two older works that I think capture the intersection of journalistic norms and coverage really well. Check out Gans's Deciding What's News and Schudson's Discovering the News. There's also work that looks at how economic forces lead to bias. See Hamilton's All the News That's Fit to Sell for an intro to that.

On media effects on behavior, start with Iyengar and Kinder's News that Matters. Beyond that, I'm partial to Graber's Processing the News, Soroka's Negativity in Democratic Politics, and Ladd's Why Americans Hate the Media and How it Matters.

If you're interested in how recent changes to the media environment (cable TV, internet, etc.) have affected things, I would recommend Prior's Post-Broadcast Democracy, Arceneaux and Johnson's Changing Minds or Changing Channels, Levendusky's How Partisan Media Polarize America, and Hindman's The Myth of Digital Democracy.

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't recommend some Lippmann or some Edelman. Those are for more high-minded/theory-driven thinking about how the media constructs our realities.

I know that's a lot, but there's a ton of stuff I'm cutting out as is (nothing about selective exposure or motivated reasoning, barely touching on the framing literature). If you have any more specific questions about American media, I can probably narrow it down some more.

Oh, and a couple quick recommendations on the other questions (which aren't really my specialty). I really liked Democracy for Realists by Achen and Bartels. Frances Lee's new book on political messaging in Congress is pretty interesting. And I'm a subscriber to the legislative subsidy school of thought on interest groups.

This isn't a new phenomenon. For anyone interested in learning more about the issue (Instead of just bitching about it on Reddit), I'd recommend Constructing the Political Spectacle by Murray Edelman. He really gets to the meat of the issue without dissolving into partisan hackery.