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Albany, NY – In today's Academic Minute, Professor Dean Goldberg of Mount Saint Mary College reveals how political campaigns came to rely so heavily on television commercials.
Dean Goldberg is an assistant professor of communication arts at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, New York, where he teaches courses in television production. As a film editor and producer he has worked on more than fifty political campaigns, including those of Senator Ted Kennedy, Senator John Glenn, and Senator Frank Lautenberg. Professor Goldberg holds a BFA from CUNY at Hunter College and a MFA from Goddard College.
Prof. Dean Goldberg - TV Ads and Political Campaigns
In 1979 Kevin White, then Mayor of Boston, facing an unprecedented fourth term in office, hired a young political consultant named David H. Sawyer to produce his campaign ads. Together with ad exec, Scott Miller, and Ned Kennan, one of the new wave of holistic pollsters, Sawyer formed a narrative that was both unique and successful. Rather than try to change the public's perception that White was an autocrat, Sawyer and Miller turned White's toughness into an asset. They pitched White as "the loner in love with the city," and produced television ads that looked more like Coca Cola commercials then the traditional documentary look of the time. The spots were so slick, if fact, that they were reviewed by a Boston movie critic.
When asked if slick TV ads and constant focus groups were ruining the political process, the consultants would unabashedly defend their methods. To them, television was a more intimate connection and had pushed the balance of power out of the backroom and back to the people. As James Harding says in his book Alpha Dogs, The Americans who turned political spin into a global business, " the men at the Sawyer Miller Group and a whole new breed of political professionals realized that the power of television was more profound, but less ennobling."
Thirty years later that model has been turned on its head, and consultants are spending more time in crises mode than fashioning a message that integrates the vision of their candidate with the American public. The 24/7 news cycle and the Internet have redrawn the field on which the game of media and politics are played. But even as a candidate's image may now be redefined with each news cycle, the spin that David Sawyer, Scott Miller and Ned Kennan invented remains a bible for the election process.