Page 144 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS

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, advertising, 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
communicator emerged, first developed in the United States 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 PR. 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). 1
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 parts of the United States. Traditional party
organisations were weak. In this environment of particular
sensitivity to (volatile) public opinion, political consultants,
Nimmo argues, in effect filled the space occupied elsewhere by
party political machines. From Campaigns Inc. developed what
Nimmo calls a nationwide ‘service industry’ (1970, p.39),
facilitating political communication between parties, candidates,

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