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146
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.
FURTHER READING
Bernays, Edward L. Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L.
Bernays. New York: Simon, 1965.
———. Crystallizing Public Opinion. New York: Horace Liveright, 1923.
Bird, William L. “Better Living”: Advertising, Media, and the New Vocabulary of Business
Leadership, 1935–1955. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1999.
Burton, Bob. Inside Spin: The Dark Underbelly of the PR Industry. New York: Allen &
Unwin, 2007.
Chernow, Ron. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. New York: Vintage Books, 2013.
Cutlip, Scott M. The Unseen Power: Public Relations. A History. New York: Routledge,
2009.
Egan, Timothy. “The Swoon of the Swoosh.” New York Times Magazine, September 13,
1998.
Ewen, Stuart. PR! A Social History of Spin. New York: Basic, 1996.
Hiebert, Ray Eldon. Courtier to the Crowd: The Story of Ivy Lee and the Development of
Public Relations. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1966.
Jacobson, Michael, and Laurie Ann Mazur. Marketing Madness. New York: Westview,
1995.
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