Corporate Public Affairs

Interacting With Interest Groups, Media, and Government

Otto Lerbinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781135599980
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

Corporate Public Affairs explores the increasing interest in public affairs by today's organizations. Lerbinger indicates that more and more frequently corporations are establishing public affairs positions--typically within public relations departments--to respond to issues and concerns arising out of the sociopolitical environment in which the corporation functions. He articulates the functions and responsibilities of the public affairs role, and investigates the approaches to dealing with primary constituencies--interest groups, media, and government.

Divided into five parts, this book:
*provides an overview of the corporate public affairs function;
*explores strategies of the myriad interest groups in the United States, such as labor unions and environmental, consumer, women's, and human rights groups;
*recognizes the media's increasing coverage of business events, especially negative ones, that have tremendous power both to undermine corporate credibility and to support public policy positions;
* deals with legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government; and
*raises the question of how corporate power strategies have affected the political marketplace.

This book will appeal to advanced-level students, scholars, and practitioners in public relations and business fields.

III: Media Strategies

When an emerging issue progresses to the public involvement stage, the mass media play a critical role. By drawing attention to an issue and possibly influencing the way people think about it, the media set the agenda of what people talk about. Managers know that once public opinion is crystallized, it is more difficult to change. Thus, if an issue is important to a company it quickly endeavors to shape public discussion in its favor. If an unwelcome issue is initiated by government or an interest group and there are indications that the issue cannot be contained, a corporation or industry group would try to jump the gun and move to the public involvement stage as quickly as possible.

The news media are a major force in the business environment because of their reputed power to reach most people and sometimes influence attitudes and behavior. A 2004 annual report on American journalism reports that by a 55% to 29% margin, most Americans say the media’s influence is growing, a view held consistently since the mid-1980s.¹ Public relations practitioners are heavily engaged in media relations because they generally believe that the news media are the most powerful outside force in the life of a business executive. As investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein demonstrated in Nixon’s Watergate scandal and incessant media coverage of the Clinton–Lewinsky sex scandal dramatized, even the president of the United States could be unseated. Thus, could not the heads of major corporations face a similar fate?

The answer came with the bankruptcy of Enron Corporation in December 2001 and the subsequent media concentration on corporate violations of the “full and timely disclosure” requirements of the Securities and Exchange Act. Many CEOs were subsequently unseated: Imclone’s Samuel Waksal, Adelphia Communications’ John Rigas, Tyco International’s Dennis Kozlowski, and WorldCom’s Scott Sullivan.² Furthermore, with continuing media coverage of corporate deception and wrongdoing, public attitudes toward business soured and led to greater government intervention in business affairs, as symbolized by passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (see chap. 14). These events proved that the news media play a major role in influencing public opinion and stimulating government action, even though they faltered in their watchdog function of exposing business wrongdoing. There is no doubt that business reinforced the reality that the media are one of the major forces in their sociopolitical environments.

Business news has been the fastest growing editorial segment in newspapers, both among metropolitan giants and hometown dailies.³ Business news has also become a staple of mainstream television, said a cover story in USA Today during the first month of the new millennium. It reported that in the last 3 months of 1999, the financial news cable network CNBC attracted more viewers than general news network CNN on weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. This trend prompted CNN to boost its weekday business news programs to 5.5 hours a day from 2.5. A further indication of rising interest in business news is that, even on the three American evening network news programs (NBC, ABC, and CBS), the number of business stories rose 19% in 1999 to 1,175 from 989 in 1998, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs. Its president, Robert Lichter, declared, “The genre of financial journalism isn’t just a beat. It’s a whole industry of its own.”⁴

Several reasons account for the growth in business news: the long economic boom of the 1990s, especially the rise of the Internet economy; the proportion of Americans owning stock, which grew to 80% in 2002; and the spread of globalization.⁵ Furthermore, according to the results of the 2003 Middleberg/Ross Survey of Media, reports of unethical or illegal behavior by corporations or individual executives have focused journalists’ attention on the critical topic of corporate credibility. Among journalists who regularly cover business and technology issues, 86% say disclosures of unethical behavior on the part of a corporation’s ruling body sometimes or always affect financial coverage, and 72% say they sometimes or always affect product coverage.⁶

POWER OF THE MASS MEDIA

News media in the United States are especially powerful because they are protected by the First Amendment. They represent the fourth estate—after the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. Business might question to whom the media are accountable; but when business or government has sought to interfere with the media, the courts have defended them by opposing prior restraint of news stories and allowing the press to keep its sources confidential.

The basic function of the news media is to direct public attention to selected events, provide important information, and offer analysis and comments. In the United States, as well as in all democratic societies, the media serve the surveillance function of warning the public of dangers, malfunctions, and social transgressions. Stephan Lesher’s Media Unbound describes how modern journalism “for three hundred years the people’s gadfly, gossip, town crier, court jester, and sometimes champion—had assimilated sinister power.”⁷ Lesher states, “America has become media-minded, believing and acting on journalistic information more than any other source or institution.”⁸

Most public relations campaigns and other public communication campaigns rely heavily on the mass media, on the assumption that they are effective in reaching the general public. This reliance was demonstrated when the PRSA announced the 1994 winners of the prestigious Silver Anvil Awards. The awards chairman, Jim Roop, observed that “central to almost all the programs was extensive media coverage and support, belying the criticism that public relations is media soft.”⁹ Elaborating on this statement, he said, “There has been some criticism that the industry is moving away from its traditional roots in publicity and going with more controlled media. The fact that so many of the Silver Anvil programs were based on publicity campaigns suggests it’s not a correct assessment.”¹⁰ That statement remains valid a decade later. For example, in awarding the 2004 Bronze Anvil Awards for “outstanding achievement in public relations tactics,” the public relations firm of Jackson Spalding was praised for its effort in generating more than 16.5 million media impressions, with more than 2,200 positive stories and coverage on major television affiliates throughout the United States for its client’s consumer campaign.¹¹ Bacon’s MediaSource, as well as other publicity reference services, remain an essential part of most public relations offices.

In believing that the mass media continue to be highly effective, Roop referred to the Silver Anvil entry on Pepsi’s syringe crisis in which some customers complained that they found syringes and needles in Pepsi cans.¹² He commented, “Through mass media Pepsi alleviated fears,” bringing people back to buy its product. In a second reference, to CARE’s Somalia effort, he said, “People contributed as a result of CARE’s effort to raise awareness about the problems in that country and the need for food and clothing there.”¹³

Roop, however, does not limit the media’s power to crisis situations that are fanned by the media in the first place. By saying that the mass media can be effective in raising people’s awareness of tragedies in the world and prompting them to be generous, he implies that the mass media can be effective in motivating people’s behavior. He thus believes that the media are effective on all four levels of the hierarchy of effects: raising awareness, increasing understanding, changing attitudes, and influencing behavior. This success is rarely achieved.

Interest Groups Use the Mass Media Too

Besides corporations and government, labor unions and social action groups recognize the importance of the news media. Although questioning the impartiality of the media and therefore relying on their own communication channels with members, these groups realize it is important to enlist the support of public opinion and to “democratize” the media. Charlotte Ryan supports this view in Prime Time Activism: “But our society is heavily media-dependent and if we ignore mainstream media, we abandon audiences with little or no access to alternative and opposition media.”¹⁴ She helps “challengers” understand how to make their causes and activities “newsworthy.” She describes how Local 26, in seeking a new master contract with 14 large Boston hotels, at first despaired of not being able to get media coverage for its cause, but learned how to play the game.¹⁵

AGENDA SETTING

In serving their watchdog function, the news media also set the agenda for society. As described by Donald L. Shaw and Maxwell E. McCombs, “The mass media may not be successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about.”¹⁶ However, the media’s effectiveness goes beyond this modest function of agenda setting. There is mounting evidence that the modern mass media shape how people think about an event or issue.

Framing

The media influence how people think about a topic by framing it: drawing attention to certain features of an issue while minimizing attention to others. As described by Joseph N. Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “The act of framing determines what is included and excluded, what is salient and what is unimportant. It focuses the viewer’s attention on its subjects in specific ways.”¹⁷ The act of framing thus shifts the focus from what is said to how it is said.

This process is illustrated by an analysis of U.S. newspaper coverage of the merger of the automobile manufacturers Daimler-Benz and Chrysler in 1998. A major public relations effort created the mythic frames of “marriage”—establishing an equilibrium of two partners— and “birth.” In this way the global relevance of the merger and the oligopolistic tendencies of the car industry, as well as other divisive issues, were avoided. “The PR departments were successful mythmakers who established the overall frame of reference for the coverage. Unlike the familiar agenda-setting dictum, public relations told the journalists what to think about and how to think about it.”¹⁸

In addition to framing, journalists engage in priming, which refers to the frequency with which they refer to a story. When a political issue receives more news attention than other issues, people assign greater weight to that issue when judging politicians who had some direct responsibility for it.¹⁹ Priming thereby serves to establish criteria for judgment.

Framing techniques are routinely used by television news commentators and newspaper reporters, as described in Dirty Politics by Kathleen Hall Jamieson.²⁰ By using a script or story form schema, reporters condition audiences to see a political campaign as a “game” or “war “ between a “front runner “ and an “underdog” in which each candidate’s goal is winning.²¹ She adds, “Schemas influence how we perceive new information, how we remember old information, and how we relate the old and new.”²² By using a horse race analogy, reporters in effect define policy issues, or substance, as lying outside the orbit of real news.

Because framing labels events and issues, corporate public affairs professionals must pay attention to its impact. For example, public perceptions are more severe when an accidental spill of toxic chemicals into a river is called an environmental disaster rather than an incident. Framing also judges events: Does the collapse of scaffolding at a construction site indicate criminal negligence by a construction company? Is a payment to a foreign political figure a sign that a company is corrupt?

How words influence choices is illustrated in an experiment in which audiences were asked about the desirability of military intervention by the United States in defending a hypothetical foreign country from invasion by one of its neighbors. The first scenario reminded readers of the Vietnam War by mentioning “chinook helicopters” and briefings taking place in “Dean Rusk Hall.” A second scenario, which indirectly cued memories of World War II, used phrases such as “blitzkrieg invasion” and briefings in “Winston Churchill Hall.” The second scenario resulted in greater support for intervention than did the first. As the example suggests, the words used invoke different inferences and arouse “well-established knowledge structures.”²³

Arbiter Function of the Media

Louis Banks, a respected journalist whose editorial career with Time, Inc., spanned nearly 30 years, summarized this expanded role of the media. He said the media are not only conveyers of news, but arbiters of its content as well: “The news industry—television, radio, magazines, newspaper—stands as the principal arbiter of social attitudes toward business (and all institutions).” His view was, “Broadly speaking, mass media news selection and interpretation feeds the public’s suspicions about corporate practice … and interprets corporate affairs with a negative bias.”²⁴

Because of the power of the media, Banks advises that a business...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• LEA’s Communication Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• I: Introduction
• II: Interest Group Strategies
• III: Media Strategies
• IV: Governmental Strategies
• V: Dominance Versus Competition