| | | Yet another excellent segment on On the Media.
The Birth of the Modern Campaign
October 23, 2020
There is hyperbole about the critical importance of every general election. But modern methods of seeding lies and hysteria into a campaign — the precision of it, the craft — can be traced back to a single race: in 1934, for California governor. In that election, Upton Sinclair, muckraking journalist and erstwhile socialist, won the primary for the governorship of California by a landslide. The response from the state's newspapers and the motion picture industry was swift and merciless: they used every trick they could think of to defeat him. Back in 2010, Brooke spoke to Greg Mitchell, author of The Campaign of the Century, who argued that, for better or worse, the anti-Sinclair effort ushered in the modern political campaign. Then, in 2012, Bob spoke with historian Jill Lepore, the author most recently of If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, who looked at the role of political consulting in that election and the decades to follow — in particular by Campaigns Inc., a consulting firm that pioneered tactics like the out-of-context quote, relentless pamphleteering, and what we now call opposition research.
This is a segment from our October 23rd, 2020 program, The Games We Play.
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