Public Relations: Good or Bad?

VANCE PACKARD

RECENTLY the pages of a public relations journal proclaimed the happy news that in just five years the number of American corporations advancing their public relations chiefs to the rank of vice president in the corporate hierarchy had increased by 50 per cent. Similarly, another PR organ exulted that a “growing number” of PR men are going onto boards of directors and serving “on policy boards of important groups,” and that in the past year “the PR profession” had advanced to new levels of “prestige.” Less enthusiastically, the Wall Street Journal stated that “press agentry, or as its practitioners prefer to call it, public relations” has become one of the nation’s fastest growing categories, with some 100,000 practitioners — an increase of 700 per cent in a decade — making incomes ranging from $5000 to $100,000.

Public relations men, whether as corporate staffmen or as hired counsel, are acquiring power and acceptance in America’s executive suites. Outside their business they can be witty and irreverent, but when they talk about their “profession,” many tend to posture and pontificate. They are affronted if you address them as press agents or publicists even though they may spend 99 per cent of their time seeking free publicity for their client or company or the company’s products. (The Blue Angel night club has a director of public relations.) A female acquaintance of mine doingpublicity for a large advertising agency says: “I still admit I’m a press agent, but everybody else at the office is a PR counsel. Press agent has become a dirty phrase.”

The loftier practitioners eschew the word “publicity” and are more likely to explain that their function is to “create a climate of favorable opinion” for their client or to reshape their company’s “image.” Some even desire to be credited with large-scale mind molding. One leading PR counselor, E. Edward Pendray, has said: “To public relations men must go the most important social engineering role of them all — the gradual reorganization of human society piece by piece and structure by structure.”

Almost invariably the PR men and publicists (if we assume that a distinction can be made) refer to themselves as belonging to a “profession.” Traditionally, professions in America have been confined to those pursuits which require rigorous academic preparation, licensing, and adherence to a stern code of ethics. None of these is required in the PR “profession.” The PR people in their journals prefer to advertise themselves in a section headed “Professional Directory,” and in talking about their operations compare themselves with doctors, educators, and lawyers.

To help them achieve the air of profundity, they have recently been cultivating the social scientists, hoping to acquire lore (and lingo) on the psychological forces which can be harnessed to motivate people in directions desired.

I suggest they might, while they are at it, explore the psychopathology underlying the motives, conflicts, and anxieties of their own group. As a group they are as apprehensive as a flock of waterbuck, and as easily stampeded. In their speeches they are often on the defensive.

Some public relations men and firms operate in a courageous, forthright manner. I have had frequent contact with people in two of the nation’s largest PR firms and have always found them candid, and engaged in reasonably forthright projects. Many of my acquaintances on the PR staffs of corporations seem to be thoughtful and matter-of-fact in their approach to helping their employer maintain good relations with the public. But the devious maneuvers of certain operators in the trade force PR men to be defensive about their calling. The Public Relations Journal recently asked: “Why do public relations people hit the panic button so readily?” It wondered if perhaps the difficulty sprang from the fact that the craft, while striving to become “more professional,” is still so very young. The young, it said, are “sensitive.”

I would suggest that something more than youthful sensitivity is involved. Despite their accomplishments, PR men have grounds for being uneasy about certain aspects of their operations. The public would have a hard time understanding some of their disguises, blinds, and fronts. What follow are some cases in point. Some are simply intriguing in their ingenuity; others are disquieting.

Consider first some of the flags the PR firms like to fly in identifying themselves to the public. One PR firm on New York’s Madison Avenue calls itself Opinion Leaders of America. A Miami firm calls itself The Public Opinion Foundation of Florida, Inc. New York publicist Robert Nathan has named his firm Opinion Builders, Inc. One of its major preoccupations has been to counsel the Melville Shoe Corporation in that company’s campaign to persuade high school students to think of the name Thom McAn when they set out to buy their first pair of shoes. This is done by working through schools and newspapers to sponsor the Thom McAn Success Awards and the Thom McAn Football Trophy and Scholarship with local and national winners among high school students. In each towm staging a competition, a Thom McAn store manager presents the local football wanner, usually at a high school assembly, with a personal letter laminated in plastic from the president of the shoe company along with one of the player’s own football shoes, bronze plated. In all this “opinion building” among our youth, Mr. Nathan insists there is “no commercialization.” But he is proud of the fact that its effects “are reflected in the extraordinary response of teenagers to Thom McAn advertising. Thom McAn dominates this market.”

Other public relations firms describe themselves as survey makers. There is, for example, American Surveys, headed by Morris V. Rosenbloom, which promises prospects it can perform “effective public relations in the nation’s capital.” Still another variation is to suggest that these firms are news services. In New York there is The New York National News Bureau, and in Chicago a firm called Newsography-95. The “95” was inspired by the fact that newsmen have been conditioned to give special consideration to any dispatch carrying that code, which in newsmen’s language means urgent attention.

And then there are public relations firms that represent themselves as information centers. This is particularly the case of firms —such as the Medical & Pharmaceutical Information Bureau, Inc. — operating in the prescription drug field where manufacturers must be discreet about publicizing products. One PR firm in this field, The Medical and Science Communications Associates, Inc., reveals that it provides medical and science writers and editors with a stream of helpful research material having no bearing on any client’s product, along with items that do have a bearing. It admits that it operates primarily in behalf of drug manufacturers but will not reveal their names. Another practitioner in this field acknowledges that he provides science writers with four innocently helpful releases of nonloaded medical information to each one that is loaded.

SEVERAL of the major advertising agencies have adopted the practice of setting up subsidiaries with different names to handle public relations. Young & Rubicam calls its PR stepchild The Bureau of Industrial Service, Inc. McCannErickson now has Communications Counselors, Inc. Some of these seemingly independent firms confine themselves to working in behalf of clients of the mother firm, while others seek outside clients as well. There are apparently several sound business reasons for such a divorcement. One certainly is that when PR men from advertising agencies go seeking free publicity for an advertising client, the media folks are likely to ask the disagreeable question: “Why don’t you pay for your ads?”

Some of the most artistic endeavors in name coining have developed in the creation of citizens organizations that can clamor indignantly as their PR creators dictate. One fascinating aspect of the revelations of the lawsuit in Pennsylvania which truckers brought against the Eastern Railway Presidents Conference has centered on testimony indicating the use of such front organizations. In this particular case, according to the testimony, the companies were set up for propaganda purposes by the railroads’ PR counsel Carl Byoir & Associates. One so described was the New Jersey State Tax Study Foundation. Another was the Empire State Transport League in New York. The explanation offered, testimony disclosed, was: “We needed an organization that could legitimately mail all types of propaganda on the general subject of trucks and highways.” What the judge thought of such practices has now been revealed. In ruling against the railroads and the Byoir organization, Judge Thomas J. Clary made this caustic comment: “The chief device used by the railroads and to a lesser extent by the truckers . . . is one known long to political experts as the big lie. This technique, as it appears from the evidence in this case, has been virtually adopted in toto by certain public relations firms under the less insidious and more palatable name of the third party technique.”

A public relations spokesman for the railroads argued, in justifying some of the PR tactics used against the truckers, that it was generally considered preferable in PR practice to have an opinion expressed by an “independent” organization rather than by a directly interested party. Tide magazine, which has a wide readership among PR executives, headlined one of its stories about the trial: “Some PR practices stand trial with Byoir and the railroads.” One of the hottest issues was this use of fronts. Tide surveyed one hundred “top counselors” in PR about the wisdom ana ethics of using fronts and reported the results in an article. Some of the men queried thought the word “fronts” was just a loaded, naughty term and that the more estimable equivalent was “allied interest group.” Others suggested that the use of fronts was ill-advised for a strategic reason: a smart opponent could blow up your campaign just by exposing the deception. Then the magazine reported:

“Assuming that the use of third parties is an essential PR technique, Tide asked whether legislation (similar to the Lobbying Registration Act) should be enacted to require some kind of public disclosure of ‘fronts.’ A very small number liked such a plan but the great majority emphatically did not.”

MORE widely exploited as a persuasion technique is the use of glamorous public figures as carriers of sly, often unspoken promotional messages. Every day, the media, virtually all of them (newspapers, magazines, TV, radio), are crowded with such loaded material. W. Howard Chase, president of Communications Counselors, Inc., related with pride his efforts on behalf of the Millinery Institute of America. The industry, Mr. Chase explained, had been on the skids for several years because of the trend for women to go bareheaded. Then CCI stepped in and within a year reversed the trend. One technique CCI used was to prevail upon the mayors of several U.S. cities to proclaim millinery days.

More significant, CCI prevailed upon feminine luminaries (TV, radio, motion picture) in great numbers to start wearing hats (by giving them free hats and free publicity). Chase says: “We’ve had the cooperation of almost the entire entertainment industry.”

Here are some typical accomplishments listed in a recent “progress report”:

“Arranged for Mrs. America to wear hats on all personal appearances.

“Talked with Warner Brothers . . . regarding hats for Marjory [sic] Morningstar motion picture.

“Arranged 12 separate showings of hats on NBC-TV network show, The Price is Right.

“Supplied hats to be worn by Helen Hayes on NBC-TV network show, The Alcoa Hour.

“Utilized celebrities Ann Miller and Kathryn Grayson by making them guests of honor (at a hat show) and photographing them in hats.

“Initiated having celebrities wear hats for publicity pictures at leading restaurants.”

Another PR man is making a bolder use of celebrities by contracting with about two hundred radio stations to supply the stations with a daily five-minute interview with a celebrity, free of charge. The client paying for each celebrity’s appearance is not readily apparent. In the case of Candy Jones, the model, she chatted during her interview about a number of things, including the fact that one way she keeps slim is by eating bananas. The client who picked up the bill in this case was United Fruit.

A PR firm with the hardly forthright name of Executive Research, Inc., has been aiding the National Consumer Finance Association in its crusade to remove the rather unsavory image that has developed around small loan companies and to persuade Americans to do more installment buying through small loan companies.

The campaign produced a manual entitled Using Consumer Credit, which the association forwarded to me as one of the “highlights of our public relations program.” The manual, subtitled “A Unit for High School Students,” is widely distributed in high school classes, purportedly to help young people become more effective consumers. It includes chapters on “Installment Buying” and “Borrowing Money.” One point it stresses with a cartoon is: “Don’t be afraid to use credit” on a “reasonable” basis.

What is interesting is that the manual makes no reference whatever to the National Consumer Finance Association. In fact the title page states that it is put out by the National Education Association through its department, The National Association of Secondary School Principals. In the fine-printed acknowledgments, however, there appears this line: “Much credit should be given for the expert and generous assistance of Paul L. Selby, William H. Blake . . .”It doesn’t say so, but Mr. Selby and Mr. Blake, among their other duties, do public relations work for the National Consumer Finance Association.

A few years ago a small Bible college in the Ozarks, Harding College (eight hundred in student body) began pouring out across the land a mighty flow of propaganda extolling the benefits of free enterprise. It sent students and professors on coast-to-coast lecture tours and produced a series of animated Technicolor movie shorts offered free to clubs, churches, and theaters, a newspaper column called “Looking Forward” which appeared in 3600 U.S. newspapers, a transcribed radio program carried by 185 radio stations, and material that ended up in more than 1000 trade journals and company magazines. At one point it was estimated that 25 million Americans were being reached each week by the symbolic heart of America in the Ozarks.

All this prodigious output certainly was not paid for by student tuitions. Even today tuition at Harding College costs only $144 a semester. The college, it seems, had suddenly become the darling of many conservative industrialists and their publicists — a sort of Mecca for tycoons. At one time more than a hundred executives of major corporations journeyed into the Ozarks to attend a forum on the subject: “How To Sell the American Free Enterprise Story to Americans” (particularly company employees). The sponsor of this forum was a joint committee of the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Association of National Advertisers, under the direction of a professional public relations man and organizer, Kenneth Wells.

Recently the Harding operation has proceeded on a more modest scale, and Mr. Wells has moved his base to another symbolic site, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. There, with an advertising man and a Wall Street broker, he founded The Freedoms Foundation. With $400,000 a year now at his disposal, he is seeking to encourage Americans to count the blessings of the “American Way of Life,” including notably the “right to freedom from arbitrary government regulation and control.” Awards are given to ministers, students, advertising men, PR men, and so forth. The principal award of $5000 in 1956 went to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The board of directors that Mr. Wells has drawn together includes two particularly well-known lovers of freedom (and the oil depletion allowance), Clint W. Murchison and Sid W. Richardson, the Texas oilmen who rank among America’s very richest rich men.

STILL another stratagem some PR men use is the “free lance” writer. At the moment, the PR office of a major manufacturer is employing a well-known author to write a book in which the company’s name will never appear. Since the company dominates its particular field, however, it is bound to benefit. Furthermore the book will make some points about a product’s virtues which the company is most anxious to impress upon Americans. The book will also be serialized in a major magazine.

The testimony of the trucker suit against the railroads uncovered some interesting relationships with “independent” writers. According to the testimony, a syndicated New Jersey columnist was paid for research bearing upon truck damage to highways. The columnist allegedly printed verbatim under his name publicity releases handed to him. This man was described in interoffice correspondence as being particularly valuable “because he has never been known to operate as a front man in the past.”

A few years ago a writer respected by editors was hired by a major PR firm at an annual retainer of $12,000 and then told that he could continue writing articles for magazines as before — and could keep all the payments made for his articles. The only condition was that each article should contain in it somewhere a reference pleasing to some client of the PR firm. The writer in the first year made an additional $12,000 for such loaded articles, but became conscience-stricken and resigned.

Finally, a favorite activity of public relations men is to demonstrate the civic-mindedness of their clients and themselves. They push their clients into the role of dedicated citizens. The wisdom of all this is explained in The Engineering of Consent, a manual for PR men edited by a leading practitioner, Edward L. Bernays. He counsels:

“The [company] president’s acceptance of membership on advisory boards of national importance . . . indicates corporate interest in the national welfare. Speaking engagements of plant managers before local service groups highlight management’s civic mindedness. . . . All of these symbol-projected themes — civic mindedness, interest in education and youth and the like . . . gradually form a composite and favorable picture in the public mind” if “continuously publicized” and if they have a basis of truth.

IN ALL their activities — and this applies both to the devious and the forthright — public relations men proclaim their dedication to “truth.” The motto of CCI is “Truth Well, Told ” Opinion Builders says it seeks to help a company “present a true face to the world.” The PR men of the National Consumer Finance Association stress that their goal is to “acquaint the public with the true story” about small loan companies. Newsography-95 states that it operates on “cold, hard facts.”

Whatever the truth of their campaigns, the specific practices of PR operatives in many instances give us grounds to keep a wary eye on their industry until it is able to effect a general raising of standards.

The massiveness of the impact of 100,000 PR voices straining to reach our ears (often by the employment of wiles) makes it harder and harder for the average citizen to know which are telling the truth and which are selling a bill of goods.

Public relations men themselves frequently are critical of the behavior of their colleagues. E. Harden Bishop, the head of Executive Research, says that “public relations” has frequently been used “as a shield of words for practices which are not in the public interest.” Elwell Crissey, head of a PR firm in Bloomington, Illinois, with the intriguing name Words At Work says: “When a man presumes to mold others’ thoughts, he takes on an ethical responsibility. The PR profession is vulnerable right here because too many in our field imagine that glib deception and half truths (especially when lubricated by fat fees) are quite permissible. Moral responsibility, to tell the truth — even when it makes the client squirm — requires guts. But that is the only caliber of public relations which justifies our calling public relations a ‘profession.’”

Some PR men, I should add, do exhibit the kind of guts Mr. Crissey calls for. A PR firm with the title of Group Attitudes Corporation (it’s really a branch of the giant firm Hill & Knowlton) was called in to counsel the Hat Corporation of America after the company had gotten itself mired for six months in a bitter, costly strike over the issue of moving some of its operations South. Neither side would budge. GAC began by interviewing 306 townspeople at length. I have before me a photostat of the summary of findings it presented to the company. It reported bluntly that the prevailing opinion in town was that the management was unnecessarily stubborn, that the town’s businessmen were sharply critical of the company for its behavior in the strike, and that the townspeople were not persuaded that the company really intended to keep most of its operations in that area (Norwalk, Connecticut). Within a few weeks the strike was settled on a basis which permitted the townspeople, union, and company to resume a good-will relationship.

At a dinner of the Society of Magazine Writers a short time ago, a spokesman for the public relations industry talked frankly about the “problem people” of PR. In describing the wide assortment of those who classify themselves as PR people, he said: “We’re struggling to find a way to protect ourselves. We haven’t found it yet. We have no mechanics for licensing. We have no firm code on malpractice for weeding out these people. But gradually we’ll find some way of establishing standards of ethics so that you can tell us apart.”

When public relations people become as a group more forthright, less designing, more strict in their standards, and more respectful of the public, then — and only then — will the discerning public accept them as real professionals.