They claim they only ran the daisy ad one day before it was taken off the air due to protests, but it seems like I saw it more than one day. Nevertheless, it made a huge impression on a gullible public. But even if it ran only one day, there was so much other anti-Goldwater propaganda spewing out from the usual sources that one ad was just a tiny pct. of all the negative, hateful propaganda Goldwater received.
They did. And you did.
The "Daisy" ad was aired only once...as a paid ad. On September 7, 1964 (NBC Monday Night at the Movies, David & Bathsheba).
A great hue and cry followed and the DNC cancelled any further exposure of the ad.
However, the networks decided that the ad -- and the response to it -- was newsworthy in and of itself. As a consequence, they ran it interminably on news & analysis shows for the next month.
By the end of September, over 95% of America had seen the ad an average of 4.2 times. It is not known, for sure, whether this process had been pre-agreed to by the DNC and the networks -- but nobody would be shocked if it had.
Do you remember the follow-up billboard ads from the GOP in ~1966 with the photo of Goldwater and the words “now you know he was right”? I saw them north of Chicago from the bus on my way to Army reserve summer training camp at Fort McCoy, WI. I do not recall the media picking up on those bulletin board ads while LBJ was losing his war in VN.