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Chapter 12

Public Relations and Framing the Message

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Chapter Opener: Public relations professionals often try to influence audiences through

social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook. Social media has created an avenue to speak

directly to audiences, helping to create mega success for celebrities and corporations alike.

I. Early History of Public Relations

The first PR practitioners were press agents who often staged stunts that were reported

in newspapers.

A. Age of the Press Agent: P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill. Barnum used outrageous

tactics, including fraudulent stories, to promote his circus and museum. Buffalo

Bill’s press agents used a mix of media, including early films, to promote the

frontiersman’s Wild West Show.

II. The Evolution of Public Relations

As the profession evolved, two major types of public relations organizations emerged,

and practitioners began excelling at specific functions.

A. PR Agencies and In–House PR Services. Over seven thousand companies in the

United States identify as public relations agencies, and large organizations of all

types, especially in the service and manufacturing industries, have in–house public

relations staffs.

B. A Closer Look at Public Relations Functions. PR professionals provide a

multitude of services for their clients, including developing publicity campaigns,

producing employee newsletters, and managing conferences.

1. Research: Formulating the Message. PR uses surveys, focus groups, and

social media analytics tools to get information about an audience’s perception

of an issue, a program, or the client’s image.

2. Communication: Conveying the Message. Once the PR staff has researched an

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4. Managing Media Relations. Media–relations specialists promote their clients

by securing favorable news coverage and perform crisis management when a

client has had negative publicity.

5. Coordinating Special and Pseudo–Events. Public relations firms coordinate

special events that their clients sponsor so as to associate them with positive

causes. They also arrange pseudo–events, like press conferences, talk–show

III. Tensions between Public Relations and the Press

The complex relationship between the professions has long created tension between

the two groups.

A. Elements of Interdependence. Journalists rely on PR professionals for story ideas

but accuse PR firms of distorting facts for their clients. PR firms often raid news

organizations for talent.

B. Journalists’ Skepticism about PR Practices. Journalists claim that PR

professionals obscure the truth and present publicity as news.

C. Shaping PR’s Image. Questionable past practices and journalism’s hostility have

LECTURE TOPICS

1. Describe the roles of P. T. Barnum, Buffalo Bill, and railroads and utility companies in

the development of corporate public relations.

2. Invite someone from your college or university’s main press office or sports information

office to talk about his or her job and the profession in general. You could also invite a

practitioner from an agency or in–house department at a local business. You could turn

the lecture into a friendly debate/discussion by inviting a local journalist to discuss the

impact of PR on news.

3. Discuss a variety of successful public relations campaigns. O’Dwyer’s Inside News of

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LECTURE SPIN–OFFS

Edward Bernays: Public Relations Counselor

One of Edward Bernays’s clients was Lucky Strike cigarettes. Women weren’t buying the

brand because surveys indicated that the forest–green package clashed with their wardrobes.

The company didn’t want to change the color of the box because it had already invested

money in the package’s look and color. To convince the women’s fashion world to embrace

the color green, Bernays did the following:

• Organized a “Green Ball” and hired a well–connected socialite to talk Paris couturiers

into supplying green gowns.

• Talked a leading textile manufacturer into organizing a luncheon for fashion editors,

with the discussion centering on “new green fashions” for fall.

Bernays must have been very satisfied when green became the color of the 1934 season.

By the way, color trends in product and fashion design are still decided by industry insiders.

Here are some more examples of Bernays’s public relations campaigns:

• Bernays established a national soap–carving contest in schools to promote Ivory soap.

The contest didn’t suggest any association with Ivory, but Ivory was the only brand soft

enough for sculpting.

• Working for American Tobacco in the 1920s, he tried to convince women that smoking

was more than acceptable by organizing a troupe of fashionable women to smoke

“Torches of Freedom” during the 1929 Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue in New York

City. He also organized a group of “neutral” doctors to celebrate the benefits of

smoking, including a trim waistline and a soothing effect on the throat. Meanwhile, he

forbade his own wife to smoke, flushing her cigarettes down the toilet and calling

smoking a nasty habit.

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• He helped the United Fruit Company (known as Chiquita International since 1984)

continue its profitable banana business in Guatemala. The term banana republic

actually originated in reference to United Fruit’s domination of corrupt governments in

Guatemala and other Central American countries. United Fruit basically paid off

governments so that it could exploit labor to produce cheap bananas for the lucrative

U.S. market. When a mildly reformist Guatemalan government attempted to rein in the

company’s power, United Fruit called in Edward Bernays, reportedly paying him

$100,000 a year, a huge fee in the early 1950s. Bernays created a media and political

campaign to recast this new Guatemalan government as a communist dictatorship, an

A Closer Look at Public Relations Functions

• Many PR firms specialize in certain types of public relations, like crisis

communications or product PR. Some firms specialize in certain types of industries, like

food. A good example of an award–winning campaign was done by Levick Strategic

Communications, which represented the United Fresh Produce Association in 2006

• Convincing the American public to endorse and invest huge amounts of tax dollars in

space exploration in the 1960s required a strategic PR campaign. There was much to be

gained politically and economically from a space race with the Soviet Union. Instead of

framing space travel in terms of these advantages, however, NASA and other space

boosters packaged space travel as an exploratory journey for the positive and benign

pursuit of knowledge. In contrast to the Soviets, the Americans were understood as

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Communication: Conveying the Message

Some facts about video news releases (VNRs):

• Whenever you see a shot taken inside a factory to supplement a story about a certain

product or industry, such as cereal boxes on a conveyor belt or pills flying down tubes,

there’s a good chance that you’re watching a VNR. To protect the secrecy of their

equipment or operation procedures, corporations rarely allow TV news crews into their

factories.

• When McDonald’s introduced its McLean hamburger with an accompanying VNR

story, the “news event” was watched by twenty–two million people.

• An amusing human–interest story on Good Morning America about a cow with spots

shaped like Mickey Mouse’s head was actually a strategically placed VNR supplied by

Disney (which owns ABC, which airs Good Morning America).

Managing Media Relations

• In 1996, the California–based Odwalla fruit juice company did a commendable job in

responding to a crisis after E. coli bacteria in its unpasteurized products made children

sick. It was the first time that E. coli had been found in fruit juice. Within twenty–four

hours, Odwalla had set up an explanatory Web site that received twenty thousand hits in

forty–eight hours. The fruit juice was pulled from shelves in seven states and Canada.

• Imagine McDonald’s disappointment, from a PR standpoint, when Merriam–Webster’s

Collegiate Dictionary created a new entry in its 2003 edition for McJob, currently

defined as “a low–paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for

advancement.” McDonald’s got straight to work, writing an open letter to Merriam–

Webster asking the publisher to remove the entry and contesting the notion that jobs at

McDonald’s were essentially low–paying, dead–end work. This letter was sent to every

media organization possible. Then the McDonald’s PR team developed a “Not bad for a

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Coordinating Special and Pseudo–Events

• The Budweiser Clydesdales appear in hundreds of events and travel thousands of miles

each year, creating pseudo–events everywhere they go. There are actually several

Clydesdale hitch teams, which travel from their three home bases—St. Louis, Missouri;

Merrimack, New Hampshire; and Ft. Collins, Colorado—to make appearances, usually

sponsored by a local Anheuser–Busch wholesaler.

Fostering Positive Community and Consumer Relations

• Apple initiated the practice of donating computers to schools, a sure way to generate

good public relations. Apple’s donations, though, along with those from other computer

companies, are tied in with a marketing strategy for accustoming young people, their

parents, and teachers to a certain computer or software brand. Donations also enable the

company to make future sales and upgrades because the school has already committed

• American Express was one of the first companies to do “cause–related” marketing, a

strategy whereby a company supports a cause but generally spends more money to

celebrate its own generosity than to help the cause. In 1983, American Express offered

to support the renovation of the Statue of Liberty over a three–month period. The more

that people charged on their credit cards, the campaign urged, the more funds would be

raised for the project. The campaign raised $1.7 million toward statue renovation.

American Express spent $6 million in advertising to tell Americans of its good deed.

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• Part of securing favorable coverage in the news media means helping a company

develop a positive image as a good corporate citizen. Here is a list of the top ten “most

important corporate citizenship issues” as documented by the PR firm GolinHarris:

1. Environment/pollution

2. Education

3. Energy conservation

4. Human rights (e.g., race, gender, lifestyle)

Tensions between Public Relations and the Press

• Here are some tactics used by corporations or politicians to try to “kill” a negative story,

as documented by Alicia Mundy in the Columbia Journalism Review:

• Trying to take the story away from the reporter by threatening legal consequences if

the story is pursued, printed, or aired. Managing editors then ask themselves if the

story is worth the hassle.

• Trying to control the timing or placement of the bad news such as by releasing it on

Friday afternoon or, better yet, Friday at midnight.

• Playing on the competitive nature of journalism. If information is released to one

news organization, its rival will often feel obliged to find a new angle or will ignore

the scoop.

(Source: Alicia Mundy, “Games PR People Play: Corporate Damage Control Turns

Tough,” Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 2003, p. 10.)

• In 2003, two PR consultants, Al Ries and his daughter/consulting partner, Laura Ries,

predicted the fall of advertising in favor of more ambitious PR campaigns. “All the

recent brand successes have been basically PR successes, not advertising successes,”

they wrote in an AdAge article. They named Red Bull, Harry Potter, JetBlue, Linux,

• The “Will it blend?” campaign, launched by Blendtec in 2006, is a mixture of public

relations and advertising. Blendtec created a series of videos, shot for less than $100,

that featured a nerdy/cheesy science guy host putting unlikely objects into the Blendtec

blender: a video camera, golf balls, an iPod, marbles, glow sticks, and so on. Blendtec

released the videos on YouTube hoping to generate a social media marketing buzz. The

result was an enormously successful viral video campaign that, according to one media

analyst, “is the stuff of marketing legend, like Apple’s ‘1984 Macintosh’ campaign or

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Public Relations in a Democratic Society

• Explore the impact of good and bad public relations on democracy. For example, point

out the use of pseudo–events and “Twitter–wars” during the 2016 election.

• U.S. Government Accountability Office found two examples in which the U.S.

MEDIA LITERACY DISCUSSIONS AND EXERCISES

IN BRIEF: HELPING YOUR COLLEGE RELATE TO ITS PUBLICS

Pre–Exercise Questions: What’s a recent PR disaster at your school? How did the university

press office handle it? (You could invite someone from the office to talk to the class.)

Identify the publics that your school serves. (Students generally identify the obvious

ones—students and professors—but often forget about parents and rarely consider

taxpayers, who are an important public even for private universities, which almost

universally receive some form of government funding.) Identify a problem or situation on

your campus that could use PR strategies to improve relations with groups on or off campus.

Next, agree on a general goal or solution and the kinds of strategies that could be used to

meet that goal and improve public relations. Could the strategies backfire? Are they

workable?

IN BRIEF: CAN YOU SPOT A PRESS RELEASE?

Look through one or two weeks’ worth of articles in your local paper. Which articles do you

think were spawned by a press release? Why do you think so? How much do you think the

reporter did to alter the release to make it pass as news?

IN DEPTH: THE INFLUENCE OF PRESS RELEASES

What influence do press releases have? To find out, track three to five press releases from

the time they are released through any resulting news stories. First, check with a PR

organization that issues press releases. For example, you can check with your university’s

public relations office or the athletic department’s sports information office. Both offices

may post their press releases on a Web site as well. On the day that the press releases are

issued, track the local print news stories that are generated. (Alternatively, you could track

broadcast news stories.)

1. Description. Describe your list of stories. How many stories are there? Which

newspaper(s) used the press releases?

2. Analysis. What kinds of patterns emerge? Do most publications and broadcasts seem to

be willing to report the information in a press release? Did the reporters do any

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additional investigation, or did they take the point of view of the release? Did certain

types of releases fail to get any coverage? What kinds of stories received more

prominence and coverage than others?

CLASSROOM MEDIA RESOURCES

VIDEOS/DVDS/CDS

Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of American Empire (2006, 76 minutes).

This video places the George W. Bush administration’s original justifications for war in

Iraq within the larger context of a two–decade struggle by neoconservatives to

Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land: U.S. Media and the Israeli–Palestinian

Conflict (2004, 80 minutes). This video provides a striking comparison of U.S. and

international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how

distortions in U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli–Palestinian

conflict. Distributed by the Media Education Foundation, www.mediaed.org, 800–897–

0089.

Thank You for Smoking (2005, 92 minutes). This darkly satirical fictional account of the

tobacco industry’s public relations campaign creates a framework for discussions about

public relations, journalistic ethics, and personal ethics. Starring Aaron Eckhart, Katie

Holmes, and Maria Bello.

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WEB SITES

An online database of PR firms, complete with rankings and a weekly newsletter on the

PR industry.