Post-Truth Public Relations

Communication in an Era of Digital Disinformation

Gareth Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429769030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Öffentlichkeitsarbeit

This book explores the purpose, practice and effects of public relations (PR) at a time that has been variously described as an era of populism, post-truth and fake news. It considers how PR processes have contributed to the current social condition of post-truth and what constitutes PR work in this environment.

Post-Truth Public Relations: Communication in an Era of Digital Disinformation proposes that while we can now look back upon the last 80–100 years as a period of classical PR, that style is being supplemented by the emergence of a post-classical form of PR that has emerged in response to the post-truth era. This new style of PR consists of a mixed repertoire of communicative work that matches the new geometry of digital media and delivers a mix of online engagement and persuasion in order to meet the needs of increasingly partisan audiences. Using contemporary case studies and original interviews with PR practitioners in several countries, including China and the Philippines, the book investigates how PR workers have reconciled their role as communicative intermediaries with the post-truth era of digital disinformation.

This thought-provoking book will be of great interest to researchers and advanced students interested in the changing nature of PR and its practice.

1 Introduction

This book explores the purpose, practice and effects of public relations (PR) at a time that has been variously described as a period of populism, post-truth and fake news. The aim is to consider how PR processes may have contributed to the current social condition of post-truth and what constitutes PR work in this environment. Using contemporary case studies and original interviews with practitioners in several countries, the book investigates how PR people have reconciled their role as communicative intermediaries with an era of digital disinformation. The practitioner interviews are intended to find out more about what Anne Cronin (2018, p. 2) has described as “the enhanced significance of PR and other promotional forms” in the contemporary life and, in particular, how this function has contributed to “disenchantment with contemporary representative democracy.” With that challenge in mind, the interviews and accompanying text probe how PR has been used as part of broader efforts to create new truths during a period of digital disinformation. Some historical perspectives are offered on the place and role of PR in relation to the turbulence in communications and society that is attributed to post-truth phenomena. The accelerated development of modern PR is most commonly traced to the interwar period in the United States and other developed economies, but there are arguably earlier instances of the practice, such as the Sophists of Ancient Greece, that may helpfully inform the current consideration of PR topics, and which will be discussed here in relation to post-truth.

While PR has long been searching for its essence, my proposition is that the classical era and style of PR that lasted over 80 years between around 1930 and 2010 is coming to a close. The cultural component of PR and the way it is practiced is influenced by the environments in which it operates including national culture, the organisational culture of individual PR firms, the commercial culture of the industries in which clients operate and so on. Similarly, the communications management aspects of PR cannot be isolated from broader consideration of communication topics that relate to PR such as media, communications technology, the nature of the audience and the modes of communication used in PR work. The decision to consider the way PR is acting in an era of digital disinformation is prompted by the prominence of the communicative component in modern society, accompanied by a corresponding prevalence of online modes of economic exchange. So instead of physical goods, more and more goods and services – Netflix films, for example – are abstract outputs of a communicative form of capitalism. This dematerialisation has underpinned the development of large global businesses based on information such as Facebook, Google, Twitter and many others (Dean, 2009). Generally speaking, the PR industry adapted swiftly to digital communications and integrated these platforms into day-to-day work. So despite PR having some distinctive features, such as the points of difference with advertising, for example, my perspective is that PR work and the digital modes of communication used within it need not be bracketed off as a separate discipline, but considered within a broad realm of communicative expression when considering its place in the contemporary context of post-truth.

Peak public relations

There has arguably never been more PR activity in society as evidenced by the number of people currently working in the field and the amounts spent on PR services. Yet this peak in volume does not seem to have produced better debates on contentious issues as a result of the rhetorical contributions of PR people to the public sphere. Similarly, while the expansion of higher education in advanced economies has led to more educated citizens, there are few signs that this has led to more thoughtful political discourse. So considering how PR relates to the post-truth era means considering the scope of work PR people do alongside how PR has contributed to the current post-truth condition. This question is explored here through examples of post-truth PR and analysis of how PR operates in social conditions of digital disinformation and division. Specifically, the book's interviews provide some evidence of how workers in the field have integrated the media technologies of online media and computational communications into PR. While PR remains a process and commercial practice that combines the creation and curation of communications value, a post-classical variant or post-truth PR has arisen as a consequence of the need to compete in the new economics of attention. So my proposition here is not that this new style of post-truth PR accounts for all of modern practice, but rather that post-truth PR is a variant of the classical PR of the past 80 years or so that responds to and sometimes takes advantage of the post-truth condition in society.

At its corporatist peak from around 1990 to 2010, PR was feted as a discipline that could serve the public good by enabling a two-way rhetorical discussion that ensured all voices were heard in a fully functioning society (Heath, 2006, p. 96). In 2007, Aldoory and Sha (p. 339) summarised the dominant theoretical paradigm in PR scholarship at the time with their reflection that after 30 years of testing and refinement, Grunig's situational theory of publics and related work was now a “highly-regarded and well tested theory that has been integrated into the excellence theory” and as such represented the first “deep theory” in the field. Grunigian excellence theory, which appeared from 1984 onwards, offered a welcome and reassuring theoretical shelter for PR, a field that had emerged with relatively fragile underpinning in the 1920s alongside scientific management in the United States. Grunigian capture of the global PR academy with the US-derived excellence doctrine was not matched by a decisive territorial capture – nor even a secure and settled permanent academic home – for the discipline within either communication or management studies. Yet if measured in terms of revenues, people employed, university courses on the subject and journal articles citing the Grunigian ideal, the application of excellent PR on behalf of primarily corporatist interests was a success. However, there was uneasiness with aspects of the “best practice” orientation to thinking about PR and PR education in some quarters, which stirred a wave of critical scholarship. Heath and Toth's Rhetorical and Critical Perspectives of Public Relations appeared in 1992 in the United States and L'Etang and Piezcka published Critical Perspectives in Public Relations in the United Kingdom in 1996, which offered a rich set of analyses of PR work from innovative, varied and often challenging critical perspectives. After a decade of important contributions from critical scholars around the world, Moloney (2006) provided perhaps the most thorough and specific critique of the Grunigian orthodoxy with his conceptualisation of PR as a Niagara-like flow of “weak propaganda” in Re-thinking Public Relations. Over the next decade, as what Moloney (2006, p. 168) called the Grunigian “implied judgement” that PR would soon become a balanced two-way dialogue failed to materialise in practice, book-length critiques appeared that further questioned that excellence theory including Johanna Fawkes’ (2015) exploration of what she called the “shadow” of excellence theory in Public Relations Ethics and Professionalism: The Shadow of Excellence. Yet as a share of all writing on PR topics over these years, critique was relatively rare, and theoretical variants, extensions and applications of the theory of best practice or excellent two-way PR were the main thrust of research for around 30 years.

A period of around 80 years – dating from the 1923 and 1928 publication of Edward Bernays’ first books on public opinion and propaganda, respectively, up to around 2010 – can be described as the era of classical PR. Classical PR is characterised by a mixture of practice and theoretical orthodoxies, which saw PR as largely organisational and corporatist. In this view, even propaganda contributed to the general public good, in Bernays’ (1928) view by increasing general knowledge and “keeping open an arena in which the battle of truth may be fairly fought.” Eighty years later, in describing the positive roles that PR can play in society, Coombs and Holladay (2007) made a remarkably similar point with their characterisation of PR as contributing to a marketplace of ideas. So my claim is that a sustained wave of innovation in PR and public communication ran from the mid-1920s in the United States and around the same time for many developed economies in Europe and elsewhere up until around 2010. The timing is not precise and the start point for PR activity in different parts of the world may be either side of these periods. Similarly, the real development of PR in terms of both techniques and volume of activity occurred in a more concentrated period of around 60 years following World War II, a duration that fits Kondratiev's conception of long surges of growth lasting around 40–60 years continuously yielding to another era with different characteristics.

Post-classical public relations: a new style for the post-truth era

There are several components to the post-classical style and in the December 2017 edition of Public Relations Review (Thompson, 2017, p. 921), I suggested five features derived from analysis of the extreme PR of the Islamic State. The point I elaborated and propose to develop further here is that these themes have wider application. Thus, after first two chapters outlining what I mean by Classical and Post-Classical Public Relations, this book is organised around following themes of PR in the era of digital disinformation and post-truth:

1. A mixed repertoire of approaches
2. The rhetoric of certainty and division
3. Disregard for facts
4. A performative dimension to public communication
5. Computational data-driven PR and online engagement.

Since my central claim is that a post-classical style of PR has emerged in the past ten years and that this period has contributed to a communications landscape of digital disinformation and post-truth, I attend here to defining what I mean by style and also the period of classical PR that preceded these developments. I do not claim, for example, that the post-classical style of PR replaces the classical. Just as in the case of modernism and arts and crafts architecture in the 1920s and 1930s, the nomination of a post-classical style does not account for all PR any more than modernism and arts and crafts accounted for all architecture in that period. Rather it is a genre of practice that is present in certain cases at a certain time and which requires analysis. Putting architecture to one side, is it not surprising that in a field as concerned with image, persuasion and representation as PR, that we do not pay more attention to matters of style? Quentin Crisp, wrote with typical elegance that:

Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are.

– Crisp (1978)

In this reading, the stylistic or aesthetic dimensions of communication include representation and in particular deciding which “realms of reality” are included for display and which are excluded, a process central to the selective nature of PR, which is close to what Ranciere called the “distribution of the sensible” in political discourse (2004, p. 7). The making and distribution of “sensible” ideas in society and sense-making has been a high-profile function of PR during the past 80 years or so of the era of classical PR. This interpretation is consistent with the logic of PR contributing to the “social construction of meaning” in society to use Gordon's term (1997) from a paper that introduced thinking from sociology that seeks to explain the process of interpersonal and group interactions through the use of communicative symbols. Braun (2014) revisited these ideas and argued that the definitional interpretation of PR as a constructor of meaning in society through symbolic interactionism offered a sound theoretical base for the field overall.

This view of style aligns with the work of Harold Lasswell (1949, p. 38) who asserted, in an essay entitled Style in the Language of Politics, that “style is not to be dismissed as ornamentation.” Ankersmit (2002, p. 135) went further countering suggestions of opposition between style and content to assert that “style sometimes generates content.” This conceptualisation is important for the way it moves style beyond a thing of flimsy or fashion into the domain of communicative repertoire, particularly in relation to content. So the proposal here is that style can usefully be placed much more centrally in PR as a way of classifying the repertoire of display, language and performance used to engage with audiences. In this way, style helps us in understanding the work of some of today's post-classical PR actors and also offers the beginnings of a holistic and PR-oriented explication of contemporary communication topics such as authenticity, post-truth and performativity. It is also relevant to considering PR in terms of the aesthetics of communication and social constructivism, which leads to seeing PR as a basis for argumentation in society that creates realities for citizens and consumers.

Uneven vocality in the marketplace of ideas

In a crowded yet often apathetic modern political sphere, there is tough competition for attention. This condition has produced a performative mode of political communication that prioritises entertainment and performance over substantive policy explications. The past ten years have seen a class of media-savvy political entrepreneurs emerge, whose rise owes more to performative PR than solid policy proposals. While their arrival has often been disruptive, the emergence of these communicative entrepreneurs in politics is a logical evolution from the realisation that a confected promotional presence on social media can become a substantive asset and platform for campaigning. The electoral success of political operators such as Donald Trump and Italy's Five Star Movement are striking examples suggesting that post-truth PR has enabled a promotional process that has simultaneously charged public life with a combination of artificiality and grandiosity. In the contest for attention in the modern public sphere, some populist politicians and other public figures deliberately breach the norms of civic discourse, adopting an excessively aggressive and strident tone in their public communication. This example from politics is one component of how the post-classical style of PR has developed in response to conditions in society in the post-truth era, with others summarised in the following ...