Love-Hate Relationship with PR

I love the good that PR can do, and yet I hate its power to promote and support evil.

Jon Stewart has been in the news recently for taking on CNBC -- specifically investment "watchdog" Jim Cramer -- and other news programs for not asking the tough questions and providing the "real" information about investment scams, such as that by Bernie Madoff. Cramer and others, in effect, had fallen for the "evil PR message" from Wall Street.

Rachel Maddow, on her evening talk show on MSNBC, recently skewered the PR agency Burson-Marsteller for being the servant of evil. "When evil needs public relations," she said on her show, "evil has Burson-Marsteller on speed dial." She gave example after example of how B-M has been hired to handle "crisis communication" and "reputation management" issues for people, countries or groups such as AIG, which accepted a bailout from us, the U.S. public; Blackwater after some of its members killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad; Saudi Arabia three days after 9/11 (remember, most of the hijackers were Saudi Arabians, not Iraqis or Afhanis); the military junta in Argentina in 1976 after it overthrew the legitimately elected government; Indonesia after the genocide of residents of East Timor a few years ago; and even the ironically named company "Spin Master," the maker of Aqua Dots, the bead craft toy that contained the chemical in the "date rate" drug and that made children sick when they chewed on the beads. Wouldn't you feel proud having that type of reputation for your PR agency?

Then there's Edelman, a PR agency I happen to admire for some of its work with social media and its annual "trust barometer" (a list of whom we tend to trust most for information). Edelman sponsors the annual New Media Academic Summit that I find so useful; in fact, attending the summits has helped me reshape our PR curriculum. And yet Edelman was responsible for violating part of the PRSA Code of Ethics when it created a blog supposedly written by people traveling in their RV from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart and writing about their adventures. What Edelman "forgot" to do, however, was to be transparent and admit to readers that all of the blogs were written by Edelman operatives, not "real folks" -- you know, the ones Edelman's trust barometer says "we" tend to believe more than "PR hacks."

This got me thinking about what we, in the PR education business, tell you about the "father" of PR, Edward Bernays. He's the one who first spoke of "counseling on public relations" rather than "doing propaganda" within society. Do you remember that Bernays taught the first course on PR? Do you remember the story of how he got women to start smoking in public during a march in an Easter parade in NYC? Now, this is a "funny" story. You see, Bernays was hired by George Hill, president of the American Tobacco Corporation, to find out what would make women overcome the taboo (reinforced by males) of smoking in public. Borrowing from his uncle Sigmund Freud's ideas, Bernays hired psychoanalyst A.A. Brill to run a focus group and find out what smoking meant to women. His finding? Cigarettes were a symbol of the penis and of men's sexual power. So Bernays set about to persuade women that smoking would make them feel more powerful and independent. He got a group of young debutantes (he told the media they were "women's rights" marchers) to light up at a set time during the parade (just where Bernays had alerted the media they would be). Then framed the lit cigarettes as "torches of freedom" (which true Americans wouldn't support this?), and the media ate this up. Sales of cigarettes rose dramatically as women's health, eventually, began to deteriorate (but boy, were the women -- and the cigarette manufacturers -- happy!).

Bernays is recognized as playing a major role in changing us from a "need" society into a "desire" society. He believed humans should be looked upon as selfish, irresponsible "consumers" who needed to be controlled, rather than as rational "citizens" who could thrive under democracy.

Imagine what type of conversation George Lakoff (remember, he's the one who said that most of our thinking is unconscious and that we need to reframe our view of America to be more caring and responsive to people's needs) might have with Edward Bernays. Both believe in the power of the unconscious. But Bernays felt people needed -- and wanted -- to feel as if they were in control whereas they actually weren't. Lakoff, I propose, would argue people need -- and want -- to have those who are in control be responsive to the real needs of people.

This seems to me to be the true promise of PR: to help one another achieve a common good, to share the best we have with one another.