Is public relations just propaganda? Is there a difference?
There are two highly contrasting schools of thought on this subject; one is that all public relations is propaganda, the other states that none of it is.
The word 'propaganda' originates from the Latin, propagare "to propagate". It was then taken by the Catholic church to propagate the faith. L'Etang noted that the word propaganda started as a neutral word. However the term became pejorative after the Second World War. This was partly because of the Reichsminister of Propaganda for the German Nazi Party, Joseph Goebbels. It was his anti-Semitic propaganda that inspired the Kristallnacht however this was in response to Theodore N. Kaufman's 'Germany Must Perish!' which in itself was anti-German propaganda. This was then followed up by the USSR during the Cold War as they tried to promote Communism. This is seen in the left picture which given my 6 month learning of the Russian language, roughly translates as 'Nation and Army are Uniform'. This, twinned with Russia's national service promotes the ideals of the workers and the soldiers uniting together against a common oppressor. One of the most well known fictitious novels involving propaganda is George Orwell's 1984 in which Big Brother portrays the values of INGSOC through a capitalist regime. In adding to the previous Cold War propaganda, it was leaked that the USSR was working on 'Psychic Soldiers' who ultimately could force others to act outside their will. In working to try and counter this the Americans founded 'neuromarketing'. Neuromarketing stimulates the brain into adapting favourably to different tastes et cetera . An example of this was reported in The Guardian which showed that people preferred the taste of Pepsi better than Coca-Cola in blind tests butpreferred the Coke once they knew what it was that they were drinking.
Pratkanis and Aronson point out that 'Every day we are bombarded with one persuasive communication after another. These appeals persuade not through the manipulation of symbols and of our most basic human emotions. For better or worse, ours is an age of propaganda.' To further this, Grunig and Hunt locate propaganda in the press agency model, the first of their four models: 'Public relations serves a propaganda function in the press agentry/publicity model. Practitioners spread the faith of the organisation involved, often through incomplete, distorted, or half-true information.' This links some public relations activity to propaganda such as advertising. So both PR and propaganda are persuasive mediums, in my view propaganda tries to sculpt an ideal whilst PR tries to show that an ideal has been reached. A contemporary example of persuasive PR that has come to the fore is Tony Blair's spin campaign with Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson. An article in the New York Times defines spin as a form of propaganda, achieved through providing an interpretation of an event or campaign to persuade public opinion in favor or against a certain organization or public figure. While traditional public relations may also rely on creative presentation of the facts, "spin" often, though not always, implies disingenuous, deceptive and/or highly manipulative tactics. It was this "propaganda" that discredited Mr. Blair and as a result the majority of what he said was almost immediately dismissed as spin.
This suggests that PR and propaganda go hand in hand together or perhaps more appropriately they each walk across the same tightrope in which one slip could see them discredited.
