Page 154 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS

exemplary case of the risks inherent when politicians go in search of
free media opportunities.
Politicians, therefore, while desiring media exposure of this
more ‘authentic’ kind, 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 com-
munication 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 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). 1

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