Leo Bogart, 84, Sociologist Who Studied Role of Media in Culture, Is Dead

NY Times
Leo Bogart, a sociologist, author and marketing specialist who was known for studying the role of the mass media in culture, died Saturday at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. He was 84.

The cause of death was babesiosis, a parasitic disease that is transmitted by ticks, said his wife of 57 years, the former Agnes Cohen.

Dr. Bogart, who also studied advertising and public opinion and wrote nearly a dozen books, argued that market forces should not be the sole determinant of media content. He decried the increasing presence of violence and sex in film and television, asserting in his most recent book, "Over the Edge," that advertisers degrade content through their desire to capture the youth market.

He was an influential figure in the marketing and advertising industries. He served for many years as the executive vice president and general manager of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau, the sales and marketing organization of the newspaper industry.

He taught marketing at New York University, Columbia University and the Illinois Institute of Technology. He was a senior fellow at the Center for Media Studies at Columbia and a Fulbright research fellow in France.

At his death, Dr. 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.

Dr. Bogart was born in Lwow, now Lvov, Poland, and moved to the United States with his family at age 2, eventually becoming fluent in seven languages. After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1941, he joined the Army Signal Intelligence Corps. Fluent in German, he intercepted communications in Germany during World War II. He chronicled that experience in his memoir, "How I Earned the Ruptured Duck: From Brooklyn to Berchtesgaden in World War II." He earned a doctorate in sociology at the University of Chicago.

After checking into Mount Sinai on Aug. 7, Dr. Bogart learned that he had babesiosis, a malarialike infectious disease that destroys red blood cells. It is typically found in coastal islands of the Northeast, and Mrs. Bogart said her husband might have contracted it on a trip to the couple's home on Long Island.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by two children, Michele H. Bogart and Gregory Charles Bogart; and one grandchild.