Page 142 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 121

POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS
disaster’ as much as any question of policy. Brown had underestimated the
capacity of free media to bite back. 1
Politicians, therefore, while desiring media exposure of the more ‘authen-
tic’ kind permitted by free media opportunities, also strive to reimpose some
kind of control over the output. To achieve this requires that politicians
employ professionals skilled in the workings of the media.

POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

As the media’s heightened role in the conduct of political discourse became
apparent, the twentieth century witnessed the birth and rapid growth of a new
profession, devoted to the effective communication of political messages: as
Stanley Kelley puts it, ‘a class of professional propagandists’ (1956, p. 16).
Today, the members of this profession, incorporating public relations, advertis-
ing and marketing, stand between the politician and the media, profiting from
the relationship of mutual interdependence which exists between the two.
Corporate public relations, from which the professional political com-
municator emerged, first developed in the US at the turn of the century, as
big US companies encountered for the first time the often conflicting
demands of commercial success and public opinion. Twentieth-century
capitalism brought with it ‘an increased readiness of the public, due to the
spread of literacy and democratic forms of government, to feel that it is
entitled to its voice in the conduct of large aggregations, political, capitalist
or labour’ (Bernays, 1923, p. 33).
In a political environment of expanding suffrage and public scrutiny of
corporate activity, big US capital began to engage in opinion management,
employing such pioneers as Ivy Lee, who set up the first consultancy in 1904
(Kelley, 1956), working largely for the coal and rail industries.
Politicians quickly embraced the principles and methods of corporate
public relations. In 1917 US President Wilson established a federal committee
on Public Information to manage public opinion about the First World War.
The Democratic Party established a permanent public relations office in 1928,
with the Republicans following suit in 1932 (Bloom, 1973). Since then, public
relations consultants have held ‘one or more seats on the central strategy
board of virtually every presidential candidate’ (ibid., p. 14). 2
The first political public relations consultancy was established by
husband and wife team Clem Whittaker and Leone Baxter in Los Angeles
in 1933, under the name of Campaigns Inc. Dan Nimmo attributes this to
the fact that in California, more than in any other US state in the 1930s,
referenda were extensively used to resolve political issues. Moreover, the
population of California was immigrant-based, and thus more ethnically
and socially diverse than in some other parts of the US. Traditional party
organisations were weak. In this environment of particular sensitivity to

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