Media Consultants Quotes

The really good campaign consultants / strategists, take the reality of the candidate identity and get the most out of the strengths. Attempts to remake of reshape the candidate almost always fail.

In 1934 writer Upton Sinclair won the California Democratic gubernatorial nomination. The Republicans spent three times the funds that they had committed against Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election to defeat Sinclair. In particular, they used the first "media consultants" in American political campaigns to comb through all of Sinclair's novels finding dialogue of the villains which were then ascribed to Sinclair in a series of cartoons distributed throughout the state:

Ball had conducted a major study of Political Consultants and their effect on campaign success.

Carson was a particular candid and forthright politician. Most politicians would never admit that they were “taken advantage of” by political and campaign consultants.

Ailes suggested plan was not implemented by President Nixon. However. Ailes, an arch conservative who has always believed the media was biased against conservatism, later implemented his idea very successfully. This idea was the intellectual forerunner" to Fox News, which Ailes launched as a "fair and balanced" news network in 1996. The Nixon Administration however, concerned about the extremes of many of his recommendations finally fired him, which turned out to be very positive for Ailes career thereafter.

Ailes was the inventor of the "Video News Release", a deceptive practice which was so successful that politicians of all political stripes started using it. Then government agencies started promoting their programs using it. But soon private corporations adopted Ailes technique and made the Video News Release a mainstream advertising and public relations technique and by 1990, it had lost all ethical taints and was used throughout the world with very little of the old moral and ethical compunctions or stigma.

Sinclair was running for the governorship of California and initial polls showed that he was way ahead. Major Conservatives from the country over contributed money to defeat him—more money at the time than had ever been raised even for a Presidential campaign. The Conservatives hired the first political consultants who would advise on an American Campaign throughs a corporation they established Campaigns Inc. The consultants began creating posters and pamphlets many of which were total fabrications attacking Sinclair and then went through his novels that he had written and took quotes from character dialogues in his novels including some of the villain characters who said vile things. They attributed all these terrible quotation to Sinclair, put them into printed pamphlets and distributed them all over the state. Sinclair lost making the assumption that few people would believe the lies that were being issued from Campaign Inc. After that race, political consultants began to work in many campaigns, and with that came more negative campaigning, attacks and more falsehood and lies entered the American political scene.

Nixon never was concerned about how far the “new Nixon” idea would go.