{"id":222,"date":"2001-04-19T00:24:35","date_gmt":"2001-04-19T05:24:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/?p=222"},"modified":"2008-08-17T00:31:57","modified_gmt":"2008-08-17T05:31:57","slug":"does-public-relations-perform-a-public-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2001\/does-public-relations-perform-a-public-service\/","title":{"rendered":"Does public relations perform a public service?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A response to Taking Sides – Clashing Views in Mass Media and Society<\/strong> – Issue 16<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Although this chapter asks if public relations practitioners provide a service to the public, James Lukaszewski’s essay does not address the topic but instead gives tips about how to do PR better.\u00a0 Stuart Ewen’s essay says that PR has swung between responding to public demands and trying to control the public and is now a tool used by those with wealth to keep it.<\/p>\n

Lukaszewski’s essay, originally a speech to end a two-week seminar on PR, could just as easily apply to a seminar of secretaries or dentists.\u00a0 It’s just a list of platitudes to make one more effective at what one is doing.\u00a0 His seven are: be constructive, be positive, be prompt, be outcome-focused, be reflective, and be pragmatic.\u00a0 He says this will help one become transformational but I’m not sure that necessarily applies to transforming public opinion through mass media but rather transforming your own business or job performance.<\/p>\n

Ewen begins with a short history of PR, beginning around 1900 when large companies had to face an informed public and build up confidence in free market business.\u00a0 It later changed to a matter of convincing or tricking the masses into doing what corporations wanted, though after World War II it went back and forth between these two goals.\u00a0 Because of the social movements of the 1960s, PR moved away from toeing the party line and began advocating companies encourage different perspectives and groups, targeting African Americans, for example.\u00a0 This has shifted now from advocating participatory democracy to studying and targeting special demographics.\u00a0 Ewen says this can be divisive and that PR has helped corporations dismantle welfare capitalism.\u00a0 Lately PR has become much more pervasive and demographics have identified and cordoned off minorities.\u00a0 Ewen’s closing section points out that PR is most often used by those with all the wealth to perpetuate themselves.<\/p>\n

These essays were a pretty weak look at the issue.\u00a0 The first one was nothing but an inspirational speaker who could have been talking to any profession and the second only got to a real point near the end.\u00a0 Also, this seems like a silly question.\u00a0 Does PR provide a service?\u00a0 Of course-to the company who hired the PR people.\u00a0 Does it provide a service to the public or boost democracy?\u00a0 Probably not, but it was never meant to.\u00a0 Ewen touches on part of the problem right at the end of his essay-PR serves those with mass media access and money to hire them with, i.e. the elites and large corporations.\u00a0 The only place a public service could enter into this is if the PR is for a non-profit or other group working for the public interest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A response to Taking Sides – Clashing Views in Mass Media and Society – Issue 16 Although this chapter asks if public relations practitioners provide a service to the public, James Lukaszewski’s essay does not address the topic but instead gives tips about how to do PR better.\u00a0 Stuart Ewen’s essay says that PR has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,12],"tags":[356,65,355,365,366,364],"class_list":["post-222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-papers","category-writing","tag-democracy","tag-ethics","tag-mass-media","tag-pr","tag-public-opinion","tag-public-relations"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":223,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions\/223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}