The Age of Spin

“Truth is a liquid.” So concluded Edward Bernays, who in the years between the two world wars invented the modern art and profession of public relations. Like an alchemist of mass consciousness, Bernays melted down the crude ores of ordinary reality, blended them with the fool’s gold of deceits and half-truths and produced facsimiles of fact so seamless that even skeptics could no longer discern where the real drained away and deception flowed in. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays took his uncle’s insights into the individual psyche and applied them to the manipulation of mass psychology.

But even Bernays did not imagine just how pervasive and persuasive PR would eventually become. Today it is a worldwide industry worth tens of billions of dollars annually, growing at rates of 40-60 percent a year. Many are independent publicists legitimately seeking greater visibility for their clients’ work by the time-tested techniques of press releases, press conferences and author tours. But the larger firms exert massive influence by a wide range of intrusive and manipulative tactics that remain largely invisible to the public.

The world’s leading PR operations – Fleishman-Hillard, Burson-Marsteller, Hill and Knowlton, Weber Shandwick -- are based in the U.S. and U.K. but maintain offices in scores of countries. Most couple their PR operations to much larger advertising divisions, offering their customers “integrated communications strategies” in which ads project irresistible images while PR massages the messages from behind the projector.

For despite its name – and in keeping with its word-warping language – the essence of much corporate public relations is neither public nor relational but stealthy and manipulative. Indeed, its effectiveness is predicated on its invisibility. “The best PR ends up looking like news,” says a prominent practitioner. “You’ll never know when a PR agency is being effective; you’ll just find your views slowly shifting.” Media researchers estimate that 40% of what Americans see, hear and read as news is actually just lightly edited PR press releases. Another substantial portion consists of voices and faces placed by publicists supplying overworked and under-motivated journalists with ready-made material.

For anyone willing to pay the price, PR agencies promote and protect corporate and partisan agendas, democratic pols and image-challenged dictators. It boosts or blasts specific public policies by targeting specific constituencies with a strategic blend of largely covert operations ranging from paid ads, “earned” (PR-prompted) media, and “reputation management” strategies to industrial espionage, damage control, use of third party authorities, clandestine censorship, and infiltration of groups and individuals opposing their clients’ interests.

In such a high-stakes, high-priced industry, the great majority of clients are wealthy -- major corporations, politicians, celebrities, and political parties with a powerful interest in advancing their agendas or maintaining a positive public image to camouflage dubious motives or personal and institutional misconduct. Many PR clients spend more money rebuilding their images than redressing the problems that first tarnished them. Indeed, it is largely in order to avoid having to rectify problems they fear would be too expensive to fix that they invest in reality-reshaping strategies.

Energy companies, for example, have pumped vast sums in recent years into clandestine PR tactics designed to dissuade U.S. policymakers from taking measures to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions. Through an industry-sponsored Global Climate Coalition they have sought to discredit the conclusions of the UN’s esteemed Climate Change Panel by feeding the media a handful of scientists (mostly in the pay of the same corporations) willing to dissent from the overwhelming majority who believe rapid action is essential.

Indeed, corporate PR is so successful that even many of its chief victims -- progressive politicians, environmental, labor and social justice movements and others -- turn to the same techniques (and often the same companies) to promote their own messages. Many believe that they must “fight flak with flak.” On behalf of several global population organizations, a U.S. foundation recently granted a major PR/ad agency $16 million to inundate eight second-tier U.S. cities with paid ads and PR strategies designed to “brand” international family planning like Coke and Toyota.

But can a social cause be effectively marketed in the same fashion as a soft drink? And is something vital lost in the process? Like advertising, PR can be dismayingly effective in inducing people to do and believe in things that in their right minds they might not choose, like smoking or voting for a politician who will steal them blind. But can PR induce people to think for themselves? Can it make them better citizens? Does it even want to? What happens to a democracy whose citizens have been so steadily and artfully deceived that they no longer detect any difference between reality and its counterfeit – or even care?

Underlying PR is an unspoken assumption that most people are not capable of intelligent, independent thought and action and that “for the greater good” they must be programmed en masse to act in prescribed ways. “It is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it,” wrote Edward Bernays. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society.”

 Bernays’ chilling vision has come to pass. But in the process it has so brain-damaged democracy that both the “masses” being manipulated and the invisible hands manipulating them have surrendered their responsibilities -- and possibilities -- as free and conscious beings. Only by refusing to be “spun” and reasserting the primacy of our own independent judgment can we reclaim our citizenship, and with it revive a diminished democratic culture.

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Mark Sommer is an author and internationally syndicated columnist who directs the Mainstream Media Project, a U.S.-based effort to bring new voices and innovative ideas to the broadcast media.