Rethinking Public Relations

Persuasion, Democracy and Society

Kevin Moloney, Conor McGrath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429951527
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This new (third) edition of Rethinking Public Relations continues the argument of previous editions that public relations is weak propaganda. However, while earlier editions focused on PR as representative of the uneven power distribution in society, this book goes further, conceiving the power of PR as more than just structural but also as having an important rhetorical component.

In this extensively revised edition, Moloney and McGrath dissect the nature of the modern PR industry, arguing that its idealised self-presentation should be replaced by a more realistic and credible defence of the societal value produced by advocacy and counter-advocacy. This book includes expanded coverage of PR's impact on society (through areas such as CSR, sponsorship and community relations), its relationship with stakeholders, and its role in democratic debate and public policy making. It also considers the ways in which journalism has capitulated to PR in an era of 'fake news' and 'churnalism' and, in this new edition, the role of digital and social media is examined for the first time.

Maintaining the rigorous and critical stance of previous editions, this new edition will also prove accessible to Master's level and final-year undergraduate students studying public relations, media and communications studies. Additionally, it will be of great value to practitioners who seek to widen PR's 'voices'.

1 Paradoxes, paradigms and pillars

There are paradoxes at the heart of public relations. It is widely used, and yet most people do not like it.¹ One of the pleasures of teaching or studying PR is that it is such a part of everyday life;² the downside is that because PR is so prevalent and ordinary, we can fail to recognise it as PR. Most people do not generally stop to really think about PR’s construction or effect, or to talk about it from a solid theoretical foundation of first principles. Public relations has an enormous impact on our opinions and decisions as citizens and consumers, and yet most people rarely consider what lies behind the PR messages on which we rely. As Leigh (2017: 2) says: “PR is silently present in near enough everything we read, watch, listen to and consume in the media”.³ Many of us distrust public relations when it emanates from one type of source, but set aside our concerns when the PR comes from other preferred sources.

According to the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), in 2018 some 71,000 PR practitioners worked in the UK (up from 58,000 only four years previously). Also in the UK, the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) paints an even rosier portrait, claiming that same year that there are 86,000 PR/communications practitioners, and that the UK industry is worth £13.8 billion.⁴ These highly educated and skilled workers pour over the rest of us a Niagara of spin:⁵ lifestyle features; ideological messages; sound bites; kiss-and-tell tales; press conferences; news leaks; special events; stunts; staged photos; consumer leaflets; corporate brands, brochures and apologia; competitions, exhibitions and incentives; road shows; conferences; policy briefings; lobbying campaigns; demonstrations; corporate reports; product launches;⁶ community support; sponsorships; managed issues; reassuring communications during crises; and messages about their social responsibility.⁷ This Niagara swells and rises as more businesses, organisations, groups, interests, causes and individuals pour more money and effort into PR efforts. This great swirl of communications catches millions of voters, media audiences and consumers in its sweep; and is read, believed and acted on. It sweeps by millions of others, unread, unbelieved and unnoticed.⁸ Some of the Niagara’s most powerful currents are pointed at ministers, MPs and civil servants so that public policy is carried off in the right direction. Often these currents are hidden from us and are therefore dangerous to our democracy. The rising flood also sweeps up nonentities and lands them on small islands of uncertain fame known as celebrity, as well as buoying up aggrieved individuals, waving their protests at us.

Yet despite the volume and variety of this flood, PR has a low public reputation everywhere and is dismissed by most of us as just ‘spin’,⁹ or is disdained as a ‘PR job’. While it thrives, PR does not enjoy a positive perception among the general public or with some professional groups. Reputation is the social prestige or dislike that a person, job or institution attracts. High reputation can be seen as large amounts of ‘credit’ in the ‘bank’ of public opinion. This asymmetry of usage to reputation is an extraordinary irony, for PR has to endure the fate that it seeks to avoid for those in whose name it works. An industry which attempts to enhance the credibility and reputation of clients/employers can apparently not achieve that on its own behalf. When many of us hear about ‘PR’, we have instinctive concerns about manipulation of opinion, promotion of the rich and powerful, puffery, slick presentation, hidden persuasion.¹⁰ The public relations of public relations remains in a poor state: PR generates low opinion about itself. Compare this state of affairs with other activities. It would be as if medicine did not increase health, teaching reduced knowledge, or gardening meant fewer flowers. For the producers and sources of PR, there are beneficial outcomes and operational advantages. But despite its pervasiveness, the PR of PR is bad, and through tense relationships with journalists, the low reputation is reported widely. All these factors combine into an unusual asymmetry – a voluntary, legal, universally practised activity, devoted to raising the reputation of what it represents, generating disquiet about itself.

Both earlier editions of this book (Moloney, 2000a, 2006) explored this blighted reputation and concluded that historically public relations in the UK and USA has been weak propaganda which on balance does more good than harm – but only just. PR is produced by government, business and other dominant interests to maintain their positions. It is unknowable, unquantifiable, how many millions of audiences, consumers and voters have been swept along by the great Niagara, have believed and acted on PR propaganda; but our witness of life in a liberal democracy tells us that our fellow electors, consumers and citizens have believed and acted on it some, much or most of the time. Indeed, each of us probably have felt (and still feel) the experience of being propagandised. It is these observations about others and our own experience that produce a culture of suspicion and mistrust about PR, and so generate its low reputation.

This book is critical of many PR practices and consequences (such as its impact on the political process; unequal spread of resources, invisibility in the media) but it does not deny the right of others to do PR. It is futile to lament the presence of PR, because public relations is expressive of foundational features of liberal democracy in its representative variety – its pluralism and promotional culture. One cannot legislate to abolish PR: the task rather is to assess its effects, good and bad, and examine arguments that make it at least a neutral influence on democracy. This book, therefore, is not an apologia for, nor an indictment against, its subject. It seeks to be an even-handed critique of PR practices and consequences. It even ventures – beyond balance – to argue that in a liberal egalitarian society, ready to redistribute communication resources inside a strong civil society, PR makes public debate more equal, more vigorous, more appealing, more likely to conclude with some truth. This venture rests on two beliefs. The first is that greater communicative equality is a realisable goal in liberal democracy. The second is that greater communicative equality and communicative transparency neutralise some of the dangers in PR propaganda for democracy and society. But a Niagara of PR propaganda is bad for democracy and society, and for its politics, media and markets. It is thunderous, incessant, noisome, not easily controlled or contained. Our principal themes here are the impact and consequences of unrestricted public relations operating within a free democracy, a liberal society, a pro-market economy.¹¹

Definitional obfuscation

It is instructive to consider what is actually meant by the phrase ‘public relations’.¹² Rex Harlow (1977a, 1997b) examined 472 definitions of PR, and many more have been developed since.¹³ According to the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), public relations is “a strategic communications process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics” (no date: no pagination). Similarly, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in Britain (no date: no pagination) defines public relations thus:

Public relations is about reputation – the result of what you do, what you say, and what others say about you. Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.

And one of the UK’s most thoughtful practitioners, Stephen Waddington (2016b: no pagination) has proposed that: “Public relations is the practice of understanding the purpose of an organisation and its relationships within society. It is a management discipline that relates to planned and sustained engagement designed to influence behaviour change, and build mutual understanding and trust”.

What statements such as these are intended to convey is how the PR industry thinks of itself. They assert that PR is not an accidental or random activity; rather, it requires planning, research, analysis, evaluation. They position public relations as a form of dialogue or two-way communication, professing that PR involves not only an organisation expressing itself but additionally appreciating how and why its key audiences receive and react to each message. This also implies that one function of an organisation’s PR manager is to serve as a conduit of external opinion back into the internal decision-making process. Indeed, it is important to the PR industry’s self-identity that it is regarded as a core management function within an organisation, that it has a seat at the top table and is involved in developing overarching organisational strategy. Practitioners then commonly develop this idea by suggesting PR that acts the ‘conscience of the organisation’, but fail to adduce much in the way of evidence for this assertion (Bailey, 2018b; L’Etang, 2003). A striking commonality between the PRSA and CIPR definitions is the use of the word ‘publics’, to which we will return in Chapter 4. But if we take the CIPR’s definition at face value – that PR is about everything an organisation says and does – we quickly descend into a circular and ultimately meaningless quagmire. If everything an organisation says and does is public relations, then it becomes literally impossible to understand what the particular function or value of public relations actually is.

Another widely used definition of public relations was formulated by the World Assembly of Public Relations Associates in 1978. Known as the Mexican Statement, it asserts that: “Public relations practice is the art and social science of analysing trends, predicting their consequences, counselling organisation leaders, and implementing planned programmes of action which will serve both the organisation’s and the public interest” (cited in Morris and Goldsworthy, 2008: 98). This formulation is perhaps a more explicit and comprehensive definition than that offered by the CIPR. It presents public relations as both an art and a science – an art because it requires fine judgement, awareness of nuances, the crafting of language and images, and creativity; but also a science to the extent that it is based upon detailed research and evaluation,¹⁴ analysis of a given situation and the production of a set of objectives designed to meet an organisation’s particular needs. As with the PRSA and CIPR definitions, the Mexican Statement emphasises the two-way nature of communication in its view that PR managers have a responsibility to counsel and advise their groups and organisations about the external events and attitudes which will affect the organisation’s performance.¹⁵ Too often, though, in reality this responsibility is neglected. The major advance proposed in the Mexican Statement lies in its notion that PR is not solely concerned with PR producers and their direct ‘publics’ but that organisations engaged in public relations also have some obligation to the public interest, to wider society. Weiner (2006: 35) insists that, “the role of the public relations person is to represent the public’s interest within the organisation” – but this too appears not to be forefront in everyday PR practice.

In an earlier edition of this book, Moloney (2006: 101) offers a robust view on ethics in PR: “There is some amusement to be had from the phrase ‘public relations ethics’. It is, indeed, a risible oxymoron when it describes much past and present PR practice”.¹⁶ In PR’s mingling of concepts such as ‘mutual goodwill and understanding’, ‘mutually beneficial relationships’, publics/stakeholders, reputation, corporate social responsibility¹⁷ – all of these then further amalgamated with ethical concerns¹⁸ – what is conventionally concluded is that public relations acts as the ‘conscience of the organisation’. It is suggested that groups and organisations can only operate at all for so long as they retain society’s permission to do so. As Daugherty (2001: 390) notes: “A widening gap between the performance of an organization and society’s expectations of it causes the organization to lose its legitimacy, thereby threatening its survival”. This presents organisations with the challenge of not simply behaving as responsible corporate citizens but being seen to do so. Heath and Ryan (1989) argue that a key function of PR practitioners is to discern, through their dealings with stakeholders, what values and standards the organisation is expected to operate by. The internal–external boundary-spanning nature of PR is said to give it a vantage point on society in a way which is true of no other organisational department. It is through communication and dialogue with its publics that an organisation can be both responsive and accountable for its actions. Harold Burson, one of the most influential PR practitioners of the 20th century, summarised this thus – “PR has 3 roles: monitor, communicator, conscience” (cited in Gunning, 2007: 9). Bowen (2008) found that while public relations may be where corporate conscience ought to be located, in reality too often PR practitioners are reluctant to assume this function.¹⁹ One obstacle to PR acting as the corporate conscience which Bowen encountered in her research was a sense held by some practitioners that in the real world ethics can be nebulous and so should be the responsibility of those who are particularly skilled at making ambiguities and nuances more concrete. This often means that corporate lawyers assume responsibility for the organisation’s ethical sense. On the other hand, Bowen interviewed many PR practitioners who strongly believe in the connection between ethics and reputation and who therefore see ethical questions as a natural part of PR’s role. These professionals tend to see ethics as being more than strict legality; Bowen quotes one respondent (2008: 286) who notes that apartheid in South Africa was legal, in support of the idea that legal does not necessarily or invariably equate to ethical or right.

The public relations industry chooses to frame its purpose in terms of ‘strategic communication’ within a ‘management function’ which is responsible for ‘relationships’ and ‘reputation management’. In doing so, it rests its case on pillars which cannot adequately support its weight. As we see in Chapter 2, it is difficult to operationalise ways of usefully measuring or evaluating these concepts. And in any event, consumers and citizens everywhere find PR’s claims for itself to be self-serving and duplicitous. Why then is the PR industry so determined to cling to these cloaks of respectability? White (1991: 4) suggests that, “Some idealized views of public relations which claim noble purposes for the practice attempt to avoid accepting that the main aim of public relations is to influence behaviour.” Public relations, at its absolute core, is concerned with language and images, with words, with oral and written narratives, with visuals. It is existentially about persuasive communication. This reality is downplayed in official accounts of PR: we don’t find persuasive communication featured in the common definitions of PR or in those promoted by the key trade associations. Mallinson suggests that among the range of PR definitions, the fact that almost none mention persuasion means that, “it is tempting to think the word has been studiously avoided” (1996: 16). For most public relations scholars and practitioners, the idea that PR is concerned with persuasion lies uncomfortably close to the criticism that PR is simply a socially acceptable form of propaganda. Indeed, the CIPR (no date: no pagination) insists that, “Issuing a barrage of propaganda is not enough in today’s open society”. Nonetheless, it is fundamentally true that when a public relations practitioner (PRP) issues a press release, drafts a speech for their CEO, writes a newsletter, chooses an image, or responds to an organi...