Leo Bogart
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Leo Bogart (1921 in Poland – October 15, 2005 in New York) was an American sociologist and media and marketing expert.


Biography

According to his obituary in
The Independent ''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publis ...
, Bogart was "Born
Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
... in
Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populous ...
in 1921," and "had emigrated with his family to the
United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
aged two." Bogart graduated from
Brooklyn College Brooklyn College is a public university in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls about 15,000 undergraduate and 2,800 graduate students on a 35-acre campus. Being New York City's first publ ...
in 1941, then became a U.S. Army Intelligence officer in World War II. After the war he engaged himself in the new communications sciences. During the 1960s, Bogart was among the first to analyze the declines in newspapers' readerships, television news viewerships, and radio news listenerships. He criticized the print media industry lack of marketing analysis to stop the trend. Author of more than a dozen books and hundreds of articles, Bogart was best known for scientific analysis on the editorial content of newspapers, magazines, and television and relating the results to readership and viewership. He wrote a column for Presstime Magazine for many years. He served as the executive vice president and general manager of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau; taught marketing at New York University, Columbia University and the Illinois Institute of Technology; and was a senior fellow at the Center for Media Studies at Columbia and a Fulbright research fellow in France. Bogart served as president of the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and also the World Association of Public Opinion Research (WAPOR). He was an advocate for journalists to understand the opinion polls better that the media use. At the time of his death in from
babesiosis Babesiosis or piroplasmosis is a malaria-like parasitic disease caused by infection with a eukaryotic parasite in the order Piroplasmida, typically a ''Babesia'' or ''Theileria'', in the phylum Apicomplexa. Human babesiosis transmission via ti ...
in 2005, Bogart was a director and senior consultant for Innovation, an international media consulting firm, and wrote a column for Presstime, the magazine of the Newspaper Association of America.


WWII

Bogart entered the army around 1941/42. After a stint in the Army Signal Corps’ enlisted reserve, he was inducted into active duty and assigned to the ASTP (
Army Specialized Training Program The Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) was a military training program instituted by the United States Army during World War II to meet wartime demands both for junior officers and soldiers with technical skills. Conducted at 227 American u ...
) after which he was assigned to
Signal Intelligence Signals intelligence (SIGINT) is intelligence-gathering by interception of ''signals'', whether communications between people (communications intelligence—abbreviated to COMINT) or from electronic signals not directly used in communication ( ...
where he was stationed in Europe. In 1946 Bogart was honorably discharged. In 2003, he wrote his memoir "How I Earned the Ruptured Duck: From Brooklyn to Berchtesgaden in World War II."How I Earned the Ruptured Duck: From Brooklyn To Berchtesgaden in World War II, by Leo Bogart (Author),
Charles Winick Charles Winick (August 4, 1922 – July 4, 2015) was an American author, psychologist, professor of anthropology and sociology, and academician, noted for his work in the fields of gender, drug addiction, and prostitution. After serving in the U ...
(foreword) 2003,
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(Foreword)


Controversies

In 1991, Bogart criticized German public opinion research and political advisor
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (19 December 1916 – 25 March 2010) was a German political scientist. Her most famous contribution is the model of the spiral of silence, detailed in ''The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin''. The mo ...
, who had served as WAPOR president before him. He made her the center of controversy while she was a visiting professor at the
University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
, as he published "The Pollster and the Nazis" in the August 1991 issue of Jewish heritage and cultural magazine
Commentary Commentary or commentaries may refer to: Publications * ''Commentary'' (magazine), a U.S. public affairs journal, founded in 1945 and formerly published by the American Jewish Committee * Caesar's Commentaries (disambiguation), a number of works ...
, accusing her of anti-Semitic passages in her dissertation and articles she wrote for Nazi newspapers. In fact, when young journalist and sociologist Elisabeth Noelle published her 1940 dissertation "Opinion and mass research in the USA" in Germany, having spent a year at the University of Missouri to research George Gallup's methodology, Goebbels called the 24-year-old woman as an adjutant and intended for her to build up, for the ministry of propaganda, Germany's first public opinion research organization. However, she fell sick and could not accede her new position, angering Goebbels; she later became a newspaper journalist with Nazi publications where she wrote some articles on Jewish influence over U.S. news and elite opinion. Bogart suggested there is a direct line from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to Noelle's theory of the "spiral of silence" and "public opinion as our social skin," which interpreted the group pressure band-wagon effect and the domination of leading mass media over public opinion. The accused wrote a letter of apology to the magazine, explaining that the passages served alibi functions under the dictatorship and were not meant to be harmful.


Bibliography

*''Silent Politics: Polls and the Awareness of Public Opinion'' (1972)


References

"Professor Is Criticized for Anti-Semitic Past," New York Times (Nov. 28, 1991). Original article: Leo Bogart, "The Pollster and the Nazis," Commentary. 92 (2): 47–50. {{DEFAULTSORT:Bogart, Leo 1921 births 2005 deaths American sociologists American people of Polish-Jewish descent Polish emigrants to the United States Brooklyn College alumni Illinois Institute of Technology faculty United States Army personnel of World War II