60 Years of Presidential Attack Ads, in One Video
Thanks to a retrospective from Museum of the Moving Image, which compiled dozens of presidential campaign spots from 1952 through 2008, viewers can dive deep into the fascinating history of a unique stripe of advertising. David Schwartz, chief curator at the museum, breaks them down by year, type, and issue, providing background on the impact of certain groundbreaking spots. For the short attention span of today, we’ve created a montage of excerpts, focusing on negative ads and including two spots from the 2012 contenders, taken from their YouTube channels. We selected these 22 clips to represent the breadth of strategies and styles over six decades of political media wars.