Public Relations and the Subversion of Democracy

David Miller and William Dinan

Public relations was created to thwart and subvert democratic decision making. It was a means for 'taking the risk' out of democracy. The risk was to the vested interests of those who owned and controlled society before the introduction of voting rights for all adults. Modern PR was founded for this purpose and continues to be at the cutting edge of campaigns to ensure that liberal democratic societies do not respond to the will of the people and that vested interests prevail. PR functions, in other words, as a key element of propaganda managed democracy. This is the precise opposite of PR industry spin, which boasts that PR facilitates debate and deliberation, and is the hallmark of pluralist democracy.

It is widely accepted that the PR industry arose at the same time as the great movements for democratic reform between 1880 and 1920. In the United States this involved coping with the feared elevation of the masses. 'The crowd is enthroned' according to PR pioneer Ivy Lee in 1914. Lee believed in the necessity of 'courtiers' to 'flatter and caress' the crowd. The courtiers were the PR professionals, like himself. It was essential, wrote Walter Lippmann, the most important US theorist of the trend, that 'the public be put in its place' so that 'each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd'. Lippmann's view was that 'manufacture of consent' was both necessary and possible: 'within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government'. This development also had its counterparts in the United Kingdom, but this has been largely ignored in the UK historical record. By 1911 a hugely important and now virtually forgotten activist for big business, Dudley Docker, was organising 'business leagues' under the slogan 'pro patria imperium in imperio' (For our country; a government within a government). In other words, business rule. 'If our League spreads', wrote Docker in 1911, 'politics would be done for. This is my object.'

Edward Bernays was another key innovator in PR and perhaps its best known pioneer in the early twentieth century. He was one of the first to use 'front groups' – organisations set up with the intent to promote the message of Bernays's clients. Bernays shared the same view as the other PR pioneers – that public opinion must be manipulated by 'the relatively small number of persons' who understand the masses. 'It is they', he wrote 'who pull the wires which control the public mind' and 'constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.' Bernays made a career out of serving the 'small number'.

We should also mention Carl Byoir. He was very fond of using third-party techniques to manipulate public debate. Front groups could be created by 'influencing the leaders of complacent groups and by forming new "fronts"'. Byoir did both. 'It is not', he explained 'what a client says about himself that scores, but what another person says about him that carries weight'. When word of Byoir's activities in the 1930s and 1940s got out, he and his client were indicted for what the judge called 'devious manipulations'. Byoir's firm was fined $5,000.

From that day to this, manipulation and deceit have been the defining characteristics of the PR industry.

The main charges that can be made against public relations as a discipline are:

1. It is overwhelmingly carried out for vested powerful interests, mainly corporations.

2. It is not open and transparent about its means or even about its clients and the interests it is working for.

3. It characteristically involves deception and manipulation.

4. It does not engage in democratic debate, but rather seeks to subvert it in the interests of its clients.

5. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and other 'ethical' activities are all subordinated to corporate strategy.

6. PR has played a crucial role at the cutting edge of corporate power in the neoliberal revolution.

Look at the client list of any big PR firm or at the lists of those lobbying firms which disclose clients. You will discover that their main clients are large corporations. This in itself suggests a large imbalance in resources between citizen groups and corporations. In recent years governmental bodies have increasingly hired PR and lobbying agencies. This advances the marketisation of public services, rather than simply broadening the base of PR users in the public sector.

Second, the PR industry is allergic to openness and transparency. Some PR agencies and some corporations disclose their clients or the lobbying groups that they fund, but many don't and most do not fully disclose all this activity. More importantly, wherever there is a threat of greater transparency via regulation of lobbying, the creation of disclosure laws, the requirement to publish information about their activities, the industry opposes it. This is currently visible in the fierce efforts being made by the European lobbying industry to avert binding regulation as one of the outcomes of the European Transparency Initiative launched by Commissioner Siim Kallas.

Third, PR and lobbying involve deception and manipulation. It should be said straight away that this does not mean that all PR people consciously lie, though PR does often seem to require some management of cognitive dissonance. Perhaps the least pejorative...