Political Communication and the Role of PR

  PR or Propaganda?

One form of political communication is propaganda. Various academics associate propaganda with public relations due to the founder of modern PR, Edward Bernays. He used mass psychology as a social control technique and later praised propaganda in his book called Propaganda (1928).

Walter Lippmann, the most influential theorist of propaganda-managed democracy and Bernays believed that propaganda and democracy go hand in hand (Miller and Dinam, 2008).  

After reading Moloney (2006) it was clear that people believed that propaganda is used to manipulate public opinion in favour of ideas, values and policies of the political or economic elites, as well as using a one-way communications flow which is low in facts, yet high in emotional content.  

In my opinion, PR is far from being the sole way in which people can be persuaded. Advertising and other marketing techniques evidently play their part. Almost every approach used by the PR industry can be claimed by other disciplines, anywhere where the human senses can be engaged in a way that enables people to influence others; for example music, religion or fashion. Some authors even believe that, unlike propaganda, PR is not about persuasion, but in its ideal form, about mutual understanding. They both serve different causes. I believe that PR science still has a long way to go until practitioners will be able to explicitly respond to the allegations of PR being another form of propaganda.