Media Consultants

Media consultants in political campaigns are a specialized group of political consultants who specialize in the production of and advice about the media aspects of a campaign. As an amateur vocation, “political adviser” probably dates to the formation of groups in hominid populations, or at least to their acquisition of language. With the rise of urban civilization and vast empires, the role of counselor to the powerful became formalized in the courts and senates of the ancient world. For example, in the Roman Republic—the wellspring of many of our political traditions and nomenclature—political advisers were commonplace. Cicero's brother Quintus wrote his Commentariolum Petitionis (Little Handbook on Electioneering) during the late Republican period, giving advice such as “One has great need of a flattering manner, which, wrong and discreditable though it may be in other walks of life, is indispensable in seeking office.” Surely some astute pol told Julius Caesar, running for the political/religious office of aedile, to erect a billboard on the Appian Way proclaiming to passersby, “Make Caesar an aedile and he'll make an aedile of you!”

The political consultant as an American institution has a varied origin. Historians debate whether or not the professional consultant is a product of the [Page 441]20th century, but there is no doubt that early in our history people operated as political consultants in all but name.

Political consulting also increased as a vocation with the vast expansion of franchisement that occurred in the 19th century, most notably associated with the beginnings of the rise of mass democracy in the 1828 election of war hero Andrew Jackson. Although our sources are incomplete and shadowy, we know that there were large-scale information campaigns, distributions of all sorts of materials, and a good deal of proto-strategizing. The symbolism so prevalent in politics today also was well established. Attendees at Jackson rallies, for example, were given hickory brooms and other hickorymade items to remind them of Jackson's Spartan nickname of “Old Hickory.”

The expansion of the country and the increase in the population also changed the role of politicians. Presidents began to campaign, taking donations and raising large war chests. In major cities, political power groups like Tammany Hall in New York created a veritable industrial revolution in voter persuasion, organization, and deployment. Political bosses and advisers, like Mark Hanna of Ohio, became infamous to the point of regular public satire—in the cartoons of Thomas Nast, for example.

But the establishment of the formal profession of political consulting properly belongs to the 20th century. By one account, the first political consultants were Clem Whittaker and Leone Baxter, who in 1933 founded “Campaigns Incorporated,” running many California Republican campaigns. As political scholar Dan Nimmo noted, these were the first political advisers not working directly as operatives of a party or at the court of a candidate but as independent businesspeople seeking to “make a business of political campaigning.” Such developments were not in isolation from the rise of the mass media industries: newspapers, magazines, radio, movies, and later television. In the early and middle part of the century, “scientists of public relations” like Ivy Lee and mass propagandists such as the impresarios of Britain's war propaganda during World War I were pioneering systematic approaches to mass persuasion. In addition, the “father of public relations,” Freud's nephew Edward Bernays, was developing strategies for the “engineering of consent.”

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