Departing momentarily from the Reagan remembrances, John Hood’s tongue-in-cheek column today on PSAs (starring elected North Carolina officials) led me to hearken back to my own reporting on how Gov. Easley mastered this strategy to help win his election.
With the immeasurable help of now-colleague Don Carrington (I was at the Triad World then), we figured out that then-Attorney General Easley used campaign media strategist Saul Shorr to help produce his own PSAs in 1999, which his brochure printer said was “a political piece for him to run for governor.” Both Easley’s campaign and attorney general offices stonewalled the media when pressed for answers about the apparent conflicts.
The whole episode was instructive about how our current elected officials use publicly-funded PSAs to advance their political careers.
P.S. Attorney General Roy Cooper, Treasurer Richard Moore, and Secretary of State Elaine Marshall all ran lots of PSAs last year. However, only Marshall used the government-run Agency for Public Telecommunications office to produce her ads. Cooper and Moore found private producers for their spots. The results showed.
