Mr. Obama tried to chip away at it — dispatching Oprah Winfrey and Caroline Kennedy to campaign for him, broadcasting television advertisements with women backing him — but to little if any avail.
After his death became known, a radio station in Tehran called him Iran's greatest poet and began broadcasting poems by him.
As Cohen sat at his sprawling desk, before a flotilla of flat-screen monitors, and barked orders for his personal trades, a camera — the "Steve cam" — was trained on him, broadcasting his staccato patter to his subordinates.
As he settles into his regular third-row seat near first base, he admits that it was frustration with the limitations of sports broadcasting that drove him into the entertainment side of the business 17 years ago.
In the process, his wealth and his control of broadcasting outlets enabled him to campaign for the 1996 re-election of President Boris Yeltsin and the election of Mr. Putin in 2000.
Rick Shaw may have eschewed media training in favour of a psychology degree, but a flair for broadcasting soon got him tuned in to a career in radio, working his way up the ranks from his local radio station to the lofty position he currently occupies on XFM's morning show.
As he walked toward the stage, through the tunnels of the Staples Center, the cameras tracked him, broadcasting his image around the world: proud and energetic, a basically optimistic man who believed that he had delivered, as he put it, "this moment of unprecedented good fortune".
One technical glitch, for example, had him broadcasting in the dark and lighting a candle to mock the blackout.
Unaware that the camera was broadcasting images of him, Tonelli responded by rolling his eyes and twirling his finger, a gaffe that was shown on national television.
