Don’t Deny it: Critics of PR Spin Matter

Kristin Demetrious

“PR” is a “square circle,” a contradiction in terms. Ask any practitioner or academic, and they’ll tell you that not only is public relations one of the least understood professions in the world, but it also has a lingering odor about it, a stigma, a bad reputation. This has, and will continue to be, a problem for the field.

But have you ever asked yourself why, and when, these anxieties about PR became widespread, and if, or how, they may be justified?

Over the years, PR’s most strident and persistent critics have shone a light on the worst of PR, its shadowy and nefarious activities, its huge financial resources and its thickly networked global reach, serving vested interests. One of the most well-known examples of those criticisms is John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton’s 1995 book Toxic Sludge is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry. TSGFY set out in gruesome detail how the industrial production of “truth” in a PR campaign paves the way for deregulation, super profits and market-friendly public policy. Exposing behind-the-scenes lobbying, coverups, spying, front groups, coercion and the lie of “green PR,” Stauber and Rampton’s book awakened a sleeping public and became a cultural touchstone. But they were not the only ones.

Since the postwar period, a legion of PR insiders, investigative journalists, scientists and academics, writers and novelists have tried to sound the alarm and draw the public’s attention to the rise of the PR industry, its unrestrained media power, and the growing and unaccountable authority of “the corporation.” They documented a vast multitude of transgressions with real-world consequences, from PR’s role in the 1953 cover up by the tobacco industry (when a pact with Hill & Knowlton devised a plan to deny the public the truth about the health threats from smoking), to the fossil fuel industry’s PR work since the 1970s in sabotaging meaningful action on dangerous climate change, still active today.

Not surprisingly, the abuse of PR’s power rose steadily over the period of globalisation—one that coincided with the momentum pushing environmentalism to the forefront, like the first Earth Day in 1970, which galvanised 20 million Americans. This perfect storm saw PR adopt a high-stakes, brutal and combative approach to driving growth and quashing dissent. But there still were whistle blowers and investigative journalists who refused to turn a blind eye to the problem.

My book, Public Relations and Authoritarianism: Resistance and Its Consequences, traces this long-overlooked resistance to public relations, not just for a single issue but for what it means, what it adds up to in the long term. I argue that the accumulative effects of the industry’s numbing and sanitized “plastic words,” “image repair strategies,” “antagonistic cooperation,” “disavowal,” “strategic ambiguity,” blame, delay and denial tactics, and the bullying of individuals and civil society groups who sought to warn about harms, to silence and discredit them, adds up to “slow violence.” This slow violence works in systematic ways that over time change political cultures and reduces the public spaces to contest ideas.

Building historical awareness of the resistance to public relations is new. Listening to what critics had to say in the books they wrote and the websites they created, like PR Watch, as well as the warnings they sounded punctures the idea that where we are today is inevitable. But equally, it shows how it can change, for those willing to confront this “reality.”

The evidence gathered led me to an inescapable conclusion—public relations both as an industry and as a language practice damages and inhibits democratic participation in significant ways. Those pracices are now used widely in government and in the third sector, that part of society and the economy made up of organizations that are independent of the government and profit-making businesses. And they cannot be dismissed or explained in the current frameworks..

The question mark over PR

The questioning of public relations as a wholesome and natural business practice can be traced to Sloan Wilson’s 1955 best-selling novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, later made into a movie starring Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones. Set in the postwar era, it tells the story of Tom Rath, a US army veteran struggling to adjust to suburban life after many years of combat. Home after work one night, Tom tells his wife Betsy about a possible job in public relations at the United Broadcasting Corporation. Pouring herself a second drink Betsy says: “I’ve never thought of you as a public-relations man… would you like it?”, to which he replies, “I’d like the money.”

Betsy isn’t the only one uncomfortable about the PR job. Cliff Otis, a young copy writer tells Tom, “You can have it… I wouldn’t want to get into a rat race like that.” Even the friend who passed on the tip said, “you would be crazy to take it.” Doubt and misgivings hang over the job in "public relations" much like the crack in the shape of a question mark in the living room of Tom and Betsy’s modest house in Westport, Connecticut. Try as they might, they cannot cover that crack over. Tom takes up the well-paid position and becomes the “man in the grey flannel suit,” although ultimately, he rejects the job’s demands that compromise his values, his authenticity and his individuality.

Vance Packard’s 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders would further popularize the “behind-the-scenes” probing of multimillion-dollar persuasive industries like advertising and PR, laying the groundwork for more consternation and critique. Indeed, this book exposed many of the psychological techniques used in these new, arcane but powerful occupational fields.

Packard spotlights the “depth approach” which he remarked was ingenious in gaining the public’s consent because it would take place “beneath our level of awareness.” Packard also detailed how new jobs like press secretaries, press agents, publicists, spokesmen and speechwriters could conduct “min-molding on the grand scale,” which could even result in swinging elections.

There were some serious problems to address in public relations and over the next decades many more critiques would follow, such as Joyce Nelson’s book Sultans of Sleaze: Public Relations and the Media (1989), Sharon Beder’s Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism (1997) and Nicky Hager and Bob Burton‘s Secrets and Lies: The Anatomy of an Anti-Environmental PR Campaign (1999).

By the new millennium, even those working in PR would blow the whistle on its activities. Jim Hoggan, one of Canada’s leading public relations professionals, is the driver behind DeSmog, an international not-for-profit journalism organization formed to clear up the misinformation about climate change. Hoggan’s contribution cannot be underestimated. DeSmog’s investigations are published in major media outlets globally, like the Financial Times, the BBC and the Guardian, to name a few. They have been cited by the U.S. Congress and in the E.U. have been hugely influential in telling the truth about climate disinformation and coercive public relations. But what makes this even more compelling is that it was what Jim Hoggan’s saw happening behind closed doors in PR that led to DeSmog.

Why so gloomy?

Not all PR is the same. Some ethical public relations practitioners, who are performing work of valuable social benefit, may be disheartened by linking the field to authoritarianism. I get that. But even if only some PR poses unacceptable risks to humans or sets in motion a climate catastrophe that future generations will pay for, then it is a problem for all of us that needs to be urgently addressed. Real politics relies on real public debates.

I am not trying to vilify PR, but I am trying to point out what it does and how it does it—and develop a framework of ideas that helps identify the different ways in which it works. Breaking down public relations modes into new categories like “neoliberal,” “illiberal,” “populist” and “authoritarian” assists in its ethical reconstruction, because its assorted formations are not easily understood.

As a teenager, I read a dog-eared copy of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, drawn to the image on the book’s jacket of the silhouetted PR man standing “at ease.” As I re-read Tom Rath’s story of disaffection with the prosperity of postwar America, it awakened my view that the dark “new tomorrow” we face is not inevitable and that it can be contested and resisted.

PR has led us somewhere we did not expect or prepare for, but it’s more than that. If only we had listened to PR’s critics, we could have taken alternative paths that may have changed history. The voices in my book and the stories they tell have been marginal to mainstream PR, but I place them at the center, in the belief that doing so will dissolve the PR contradiction—the square circle—and enable something entirely different, and better, to emerge.

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