From the “strategy of truth” to the “weapon of truth”: The Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry, 1942

The aim of this article is to advance in a hidden part of public relations history: the Archibald MacLeish's ‘strategy of truth’ and its implementation to film industry to influence American public opinion. The attempts during the Second World War to fight the enemy through factual propaganda also found, in the film industry, the ideal medium to offset the enemy's propagandising audiovisual products, particularly Nazi propaganda. For this reason, the government drew up the Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry (1942) following the line established by the Office of Facts and Figures and Archibald MacLeish's ‘strategy of truth’. Thus, the Manual for the Motion Picture Industry became a good example of the use of ethical propaganda.     

Public relations practice in the Arab World: A critical assessment

This article discusses the practice of public relations in the Arab World. It looks at the major problems it encounters such as misconceptions, confusion in tasks and prerogatives, lack of professional manpower, and the absence of a culture of democracy, transparency and public opinion. Public relations is still looked at as a tool for the organization to foster its image through public information, publicity and propaganda. Planning and research are badly missing mainly in public sector organizations. In spite of these drawbacks, public relations is the profession of the future in the Arab World. It is growing and expanding rapidly in all sectors of life. Arab countries need public relations to meet the challenges of democracy, public opinion, civil society and globalization.     

Commentary: new technologies,public relations,and democracy

This commentary is based on Hiebert's keynote address given to BledCom 2004, the 11th International Public Relations Research Symposium on “New Concepts and Technologies for Public Relations, Public Affairs, and Corporate Communication,” Bled, Slovenia, July 2, 2004. It suggests that the new communication technologies can save democracy by restoring dialogic and participatory communication in the public sphere, thus preserving a role for public relations as two-way communication rather than propaganda and spin. However, the pathway ahead for public relations is strewn with landmines.     

The Campaign of the Committee on Public Information: Its Contributions to the History and Evolution of Public Relations

The campaign of the Committee on Public Information (CPI) was an ambitious attempt by the U.S. government to influence public opinion. More importantly, the CPI contributed to the evolution of public relations through its use of basic principles of effective communication including unity of voice, message simplicity, and source credibility. The committee's campaign encouraged citizens to be stakeholders in their government and heightened their sense of community. The work of the CPI followed a period of unrest between industrialists and journalists and was an important link between the recognition of the need for public relations services and an understanding of the means through which public opinion is crystallized.     

International public relations’ influence on media coverage and public perceptions of foreign countries

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of international public relations on a target country's news coverage and public perceptions toward other countries. This study proposed a public relations influence model of national image formation and tested its relationships based on 27 countries’ public relations effort targeting the U.S. news coverage and publics. This study found that (1) public relations of other countries in the U.S. had a direct impact on how significantly the U.S. public perceived those countries; (2) the more prominently and favorably foreign countries were covered by the U.S. news media, the more significantly and favorably the U.S. public perceived and felt toward those countries.     

Reevaluating Public Relations Information Subsidies: Market-Driven Journalism and Agenda-Building Theory and Practice

Public relations practitioners provide information subsidies to the media on behalf of their clients to influence the media agenda and potentially affect public opinion. McManus (1994) stated that news media are using more public relations information subsidies to contain costs and increase profits. Through in-depth interviews and a nationwide survey, this study of editors' perceptions of the phenomenon suggests that increasing economic constraints have led to an increased use of public relations materials only in specific instances that often do not support the agenda-building goals of the sponsoring organizations.     

From propaganda to public diplomacy: Assessing China's international practice and its image, 1950–2009

Since World War II, government-sponsored international propaganda and public diplomacy have become more visible and sophisticated in countries around the world. China is no exception. It is not immune to the compulsion and communication imperative to reach and woo the public, both at home and abroad, for its vested interests. From propaganda to public diplomacy, the practices and activities have taken different forms and scopes, mainly including government-owned media outlets aimed at foreign audiences, state-subsidized media organizations as quasi-governmental instruments, overseas advertising and public relations campaigns designed to sway public opinion to win general support for the nation involved or to repair international relations damaged by terrorist attacks and other man-made crises, and recruiting and bribing journalists as clandestine operatives. Whether such practices have been effective in changing hearts and minds among international audiences, however, is open to debate and remains to be further explored. Within the perspective of sociology of knowledge, the main purpose of this study is to look at how China comes to be viewed as an object in international communication research over the past decades that cast the country through the prism of either propaganda or public diplomacy.     

Networks of international public relations production: The case of Latin American organizations’ connections to U.S. agents

Traditionally, international public relations studies have assumed that a foreign organization, namely a foreign government, is the primary influence on how its home country is portrayed to audiences abroad. This study challenges such assumption of independence by revealing how foreign organizations are connected in ways previous works have not considered. Using Foreign Agents Registration Act data, we reveal the direct and indirect connections that form when foreign organizations hire U.S. agencies to produce their international public relations work. Our network analysis of foreign organizations from Latin American and their U.S. agents documents the network structures that emerge for each country and identifies the types of organizations that are positioned advantageously in the networks. We use these findings to theorize how foreign organizations’ connections and their key positions in networks may influence the production of international public relations efforts for their home country. We at a macro-level, public relations effects depend on the structure of the networks, the overlapping sites where communication content is produced, and who is positioned as key players in the production networks.     

The propagation of awe: public relations,art and belief in Reformation Europe

Public relations scholarship, so positivistically oriented, has shown little interest in history and the arts. While public relations may or may not be a science, few scholars would deny that PR is an art. The crystallizing potency of the arts, throughout history, offers communication scholars a largely unexplored source for theory development. This metahistorical essay explores the origin of public relations as the propagation of awe, i.e., the strategic use of art, both high and vulgar, as a tool of opinion formation. The essay's focus is on the patronage, objectives and messages of art in the Catholic and Protestant reformations, the prolonged and conflictual era which some historians identify as the origin of modern public opinion.     

The case for ethical propaganda within a democracy: Ivy Lee's successful 1913–1914 railroad rate campaign

This review of Lee's tactics in the 1913–1914 rate campaign and the subsequent case he makes for ethical propaganda presents public relations practitioners and scholars with the opportunity to move beyond the progressive critique of propaganda and ask new questions about how propaganda can ethically contribute to dialogue and resolution within a democracy.     

Frank Capra's Why We Fight and film documentary discourse in public relations

This article analyzes the influence of Archibald MacLeish's “strategy of truth” and the principles of the Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry in the production of Frank Capra's documentary series Why We Fight. One of the main contributions of this research is to show how this series is the most important example of the application of the strategy of truth and, at the same time, one of the main examples of public relations audiovisual product realized to be addressed to American Army as well to the American public opinion. It is argued that Capra's Why We Fight made a substantial and long-lasting contribution to public relations, particularly in terms of its discourse and the use of analepsis has PR narrative resource. Overall, the article positions Why We Fight as one of the greatest efforts ever made in the history of military public relations.     

Agenda building effects by 2008 presidential candidates on global media coverage and public opinion

Grounded in first and second level agenda building and agenda setting, the relationships among public relations, global media, and public opinion were explored in the context of the 2008 United States presidential election. Two candidates’ speeches, press releases, and foreign media coverage were analyzed and compared with global public opinion. The results showed that object salience (issue and candidate) relationships were found between public relations messages and global media coverage while affective attribute (tone) salience relationships were partially found among public relations messages, global media, and public opinion.     

Printing press without copyright: a historical analysis of printing and publishing in Song,China

This study looks at the effect of China's political freedom, economic development and public relations efforts on the US media's coverage of China, and on Americans' opinions of China in the past 30 years. China's political freedom was found to be significant in predicting US media coverage of China and Americans' opinion of China, with more freedom leading to more positive coverage and more favorable opinions. More positive news coverage is related to more favorable American opinions of China when controlling for political and economic development and for public relations efforts. The number of public relations contracts China has signed with the US is also related to the increase in positive US media coverage of China.     

When Do People Speak Out? Integrating the Spiral of Silence and the Situational Theory of Problem Solving

Combining spiral of silence theory with the situational theory of problem solving, this study explores the extent to which publics differ in their willingness to express their opinions in hostile social situations. Based on analysis of a survey among 369 college students about their willingness to express opinions on 2 controversial topics (gun possession and climate change), 3 key findings emerge: (a) Fear of isolation suppresses people's willingness to express their opinions in public; (b) active publics are more likely than other types of publics to express their opinions; and (c) there is no interaction effect between fear of isolation and types of publics. In addition to several theoretical contributions, the findings provide public relations practitioners with a model for predicting which types of publics would be more or less likely to express their opinion.     

Weathering the storm: Hauser's Vernacular Voices,public relations and the Roman Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal

Since 2002, the Roman Catholic sexual abuse scandal has had disastrous and far-reaching effects on both the church's ability to interact with its internal publics and its ability to pursue its public agenda. This paper blends the author's experience as a public relations practitioner in the Roman Catholic Church with Gerard Hauser's theory of publics and public spheres articulated in Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres to discover how organizations could improve their responses to crises.     

The new PR of states: How nation branding practices affect the security function of public diplomacy

This paper investigates how the role of public relations practice in public diplomacy is undergoing a transformation as a consequence of the influence from nation branding. A case study of the Danish government's response to the so-called Cartoon Crisis illustrates how the threat from international terrorism to national security initially served as a catalyst for new public diplomacy initiatives. But as the initiatives were implemented within a framework of nation branding the focus on risk reduction became subjected to a marketing logic and a new focus on economic objectives took over. The paper points to a possible future status of public diplomacy under the influence of nation branding: Public diplomacy may maintain a function pertinent to national security but as this function is incapable of managing real risks it will only serve as auto-communication that legitimizes security policy towards a domestic audience. In the public diplomacy efforts towards transnational publics the link to national security will completely disappear whereby the public relations of states is transformed to the marketing of states.     

State propaganda and bureaucratic intelligence: The creation of public relations in 20th century Britain

This article presents a review of developments which led to the establishment of the public relations occupation in Britain. Themes discussed include democracy and totalitarianism, propaganda, bureaucracy, and professionalisation. The research is based on sixty qualitative interviews and research in the archive of the Institute of Public Relations (IPR).     

Overcoming Ethnocentrism: The Role of Identity in Contingent Practice of International Public Relations

Based on literature from the contingency theory of public relations and psychocultural conflict theory, this study explored how multinational corporations (MNCs) are practicing public relations in Korea, and what contingency factors impact MNCs' stances in conflict situations. Interviews of leaders in public relations agencies whose major clients are MNCs found that "fear factor" plays a critical role in MNCs taking more accommodative stances in conflict situations. MNCs tend to move toward accommodative stances based on their fear of Korean media and local culture, regardless of the presence of 2-way symmetrical communications with publics. More specifically, accommodation seemed to be enacted through 1-way communication (i.e., local publics' claims) and MNCs' fear of media, local culture, or publics. This finding implies the following: First, 1-way communication may not always result in advocacy as is claimed in Western cultures, but may actually lead to accommodation. Second, indigenous local cultural dimensions should be explored in examining international public relations practices.     

What we value: A Delphi study to identify key values that guide ethical decision-making in public relations

This study recommends that the Public Relations Society of America expand its professional values list to include respect and trustworthiness. This addition also shows the value this study's public relations participants place on mutually beneficial relationships with their clients/employers, customers, communities, and society as a whole. The findings contribute to the growing attention to and value of relationship management theory for effective public relations.     

Professional standards in public relations: A survey of educators

A survey instrument operationalizing twenty-four elements of professional performance was administered to 291 public relations educators across the nation, yielding a 43.6 percent response rate. Respondents assessed the extent to which a standard of professionalism currently exists for each of the twenty-four items. Educators tended to view writing/editing and graphics/production skills, ethical guidelines, accreditation, and “public relations as advocacy” as enjoying well-established standards. Licensing, location of public relations on the organizational chart and inclusion of public relations in the dominant coalition were viewed as most lacking in a standard of professional performance.The twenty-four items factored into six dimensions. Assessments of professionalism along these six factors differed significantly as a function of sex, region, tenure of teaching, size of institution, and whether the educator was accredited by PRSA. Comparing educators' assessments with practitioners' views expressed in an earlier national survey, it is clear that professional standards in public relations have yet to have coalesced among educators or practitioners. Given the influence that educators have on the future of the field, it is imperative that educators work to elevate the profession by promulgating professional standards among their students.This study, conducted under the auspices of the Yarbrough Public Relations Laboratory, is a followup to results of a survey of practitioners reported in the article titled “Developing Standards of Professional Performance in Public Relations” published in Public Relations Review in 1996.All three authors are with the Department of Advertising/ Public Relations, Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia, Athens. Dr. Lynne M. Sallot, APR, is Assistant Professor. Dr. Glen T. Cameron is Associate Professor and Director of Research, James M. Cox, Jr. Institute for Newspaper Management Studies. Dr. Ruth Ann Weaver Lariscy is Associate Professor.