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Is It All Propaganda?

by Richard Cole
July 16, 2010

Not all academic conferences generate insights worthy of a discussion in more “practical” media like this. But as I reflect on the First International Conference on Public Relations (held in Bournemouth, England earlier this month), a thought occurred to me that will have a pretty significant bearing on how I look at the future.

Colleague Tom Hove and I were invited to the conference to share our revisionist account of the role that PR legend Edward Bernays played in the CIA overthrow of the president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, in 1954. Beyond the extent of his well-documented involvement, was Bernays facilitating evil imperialism or was he a patriot in a Central American-Soviet struggle for survival? In either case, his “information” made some difference.

Many of the 30-odd academic presentations at the conference examined the role of PR in business and politics. But an interesting subtext involved the self-conscious, if not self-absorbed, ruminations from a leftward facing academic community about the “rightness” of a discipline — PR — that is largely indistinguishable from propaganda.

In fact, the conference keynoter implored public relations scholars to “embrace the embarrassing” history of PR — to talk about it openly and recognize its ambiguities.

German propaganda scholar Gunther Bentele attempted to distinguish PR from propaganda by describing propaganda as “…unidirectional messaging primarily employed in the political field, and for which truth is subordinated or deliberately negated.”

Conference attendees seemed to agree that propaganda generally concerns itself less with truth than it does with the ability to move the crowd at which the messages are targeted. To the extent that this definition of propaganda resonates, one question it should elicit is: how close is this to the reality of much of what we see as public relations today?

To help answer that question, American scholar Vincent Hazleton reminded us that, for example, much of what we now hail as “corporate social responsibility” needs to be viewed with skepticism. He told a story about a doctoral student’s historical account of Texaco Oil’s 60 years of generous sponsorship of the weekly broadcasts of the high-brow Metropolitan Opera.

How could anything so generous and obviously unrelated to the reality of oil exploration and production be used to subordinate the true motives of Texas Oil? We learned, after all, “to trust our car to the man behind the star.”

Professor Hazelton described how the doctoral student used the tools of an historian to review the historical context within which Texaco had committed decades of future profits to selfless cultural benefit.

It turns out, he told us, the student had discovered — surprise, surprise — that coincidental to that first Texas Oil-financed opera broadcast in 1940, the company was facing press accounts of government investigations of Nazi spies on Texaco’s payroll, and it was embroiled in a criminal investigation involving the smuggling of petroleum to Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.

Hearing that simple anecdote made me wonder, among other things, how my deficient understanding of history, paired with my somewhat naïve, perhaps, definition of public relations, made me vulnerable to the past decade’s bombardment of the “pro-social messaging” of a more modern oil company.

God knows how much money BP spent over a four- or five-year period greenwashing us with multi-media advertising about the importance of moving “Beyond Petroleum.” We were shown countless Americans “just like us” expressing both their concern for the environment and their appreciation to BP for moving us beyond fossil fuels and helping save the environment.

And all the while I was being sucked deeper into BP’s greenwashing, I was increasingly impervious to the reality of what propaganda was doing to make me express my appreciation to an international behemoth with one of the worst international environmental and safety records in modern history.

In addition to serving as professor and chairperson of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing at Michigan State University, Richard Cole is co-founder of Michigan’s Next Governor Project (see August Dome feature).The opinions expressed reflect his individual viewpoint and not that of the university.