PRactivities

Im currently researching Hollywood in conjunction with PR and I would appreciate any comments on this…I think that at the moment PR is what makes Hollywood go round…

According to Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, “In a small room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot”. “The truth isn’t a solid; the truth is a liquid. The truth is whatever you can create and convince people is the truth. So if someone says that black is white or that toxic sludge is actually a beneficial organic fertilizer that is the truth. It just happens to be a certain truth. So in terms of finding “the truth,” you have to believe that, even if the truth does not exist, something like the truth exists, and it’s important to try to figure that out.”[2] Stauber in his book ‘Trust Us’ supports that the PR industry treats the public as ignorant and indifferent to what goes on around them. The American public feels manipulated and angry, but they do not know what to do about it. He believes that they are aware of the propaganda which characterizes their society. He mentions that there is a secret manipulative supremacy which is controlled by the powerful and influences public opinion and public policy. The PR industry.  

As someone, who is studying PR and hopes to be employed in the industry I should be defending it. But the truth is I am just discovering the real power of PR. I believe that it can make anything happen, as to the influence it exerts on public opinion. “PR serves to control publics, by directing what people think or do in order to satisfy the needs or desires of an institution. It responds to publics, reacting to developments, problems or the initiatives of others”.

As you can see from this blog, there is evidence that activism and PR have benefited each other. I have been part of various protests during my lifetime, and I hope I will be in many more in the future, because I have learned to stand up for what is right. I just hope that I will not find myself in a situation where I would be contradicting my possible future in the PR industry. “The challenge for new millennium activists is to find the courage to let go of all their old orthodoxies, ‘isms’, and sacred cows, and to commit to a ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’. And after that, the big challenge is to bring revolutionary consciousness back into the modern world”. I wish there was a way for activism to maintain its status but the interference of PR will not cease to have control over it.

 

These are coalitions used by PR to help corporations persuade important politicians “that there is broad support for their environmentally damaging activities or their demands for looser environmental regulations”. The program involves the recruiting of activists, who are ignorant about the situation or by deceiving them to join. This allows them to create the impression that “millions of people support their client’s view of a particular issue, so that a politician cannot ignore it; this means targeting potential supporters and ‘persuadable’ politicians”.
Monsanto hired Edelman PR Worldwide to create such a coalition for opposing the social movement against genetically engineered food. Burson-Marsteller PR, in an attempt to defy activists, created the Advocacy Communications Team, an independent lobbying unit, which was used to form the National Smokers Alliance for the Phillip Morris Company. The alliance, using the funding from Phillip Morris and the tips by Burson-Marsteller used PR campaigns to build a membership to a huge amount of money, and to spread the message that they were in favor of smoking.

Issues such as genetically modified food, tobacco regulations, global warming, have been extremely important to companies which were at risk of loosing money, depending of what the public opinion supports. If the public remains still, without worrying companies like Monsanto, Proctor & Gamble, Phillip Morris and many more will continue to increase the dangers that surround us and their profits. Since public opinion has always an important element for any industry, PR is viewed as a valuable investment which can make activists seem like ‘rebels without a cause’.
In the late 1980s, there was an increasing concern about the environment, due to scientific breakthroughs (global warming). Several opinion polls conducted at the time, around the world, had indicated that a large percentage of the people believed that the protection of the environment was extremely important. The result was the creation of new laws (environmental convictions, fines). This intense regulatory system in combination with public anxiety caused a counter attack on behalf corporations which had profit risks. They employed public relations in an effort to influence public opinion, persuade politicians to stop these new laws and to attack environmentalists.
Another case is the documentation of John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, where they expose how PR firms, manage to protect the detrimental activities of their clients and oppose activists who are trying to inform the public about them.  They are the editors of PR Watch, a journal which mentions the PR’s assistance in endorsing nuclear power, sewage sludge, US foreign policy and of the tobacco industry. All of these have been the subject of protests around the world by various activist groups. In their book ‘Toxic Sludge is Good for You!’ they mention the negative ways in which PR allows the democratic power of the industry to continue manipulating and dominating, on behalf of special interests.
In the 1950s the tobacco industry was in need of PR too. When tobacco was associated with cancer and the activists were slowly rising against it, the industry turned to Hill & Knowlton PR firm, which helped set up The Tobacco Institute.  The firm was accused of misleading the public of the true hazards of smoking but they denied it saying that they were only ‘advocating the public’s right to smoke without urging them to take up the practice’. Public Relations has successfully enabled a drug, which kills thousands of people worldwide to stay away from severe regulation.  

A book entitled ‘Managing Activism: PR advice for ‘Neutralizing’ Democracy’ by Denise Deegan gives advice to people who are working for democratic social change, about how to ‘conquer’ activists who are targeting several industries by ‘partnering’ with them. The book is addressed to PR practitioners whose main clients are involved in animal testing, nuclear waste, toxic dumps, genetically engineered foods e.t.c, providing information on how to avoid certain traps. These clients are obviously targeted by several activist groups (environmentalists, animal rights groups, human rights). The author, who is a PR veteran, supports that activists are ‘a growing threat to organizations of all shapes and sizes’ due to the aggressive tactics activists use, like encouraging boycotts, generating bad publicity, seeking government and legislative intervention, which result in damaging the reputation, sales, profitability, employee satisfaction and more. But PR stands for exactly the opposite of that. It focuses a lot on reputation; it is the “result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you”. Deegan continues by mentioning that activists can be cooperative, by changing their aggressive approach if they are handled appropriately. This can be achieved by following a series of steps which include learning who they are, what they want, how far are they prepared to go and what is the best way to deal with them.  

“The most compelling protest movement of the nineteenth century was the abolitionist or anti-slavery movement, which consisted of many allied organizations. These organizations found that their cause was helped not only by news releases and press agentry stunts but also by getting public figures and newspaper editors to endorse their efforts and ideas. Forming an editorial alliance with a mass medium extended the reach of their message and gave it prestige and credibility”.

 

An example of the collaboration of PR and activism is the REBEL movement (Reaching Everyone by Exposing Lies). The New Jersey’s New Youth Antitobacco Movement was formed in 2000, by the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services, planned a ‘Kick-Ash Weekend’ involving 340 teens from 21 counties. The teens were involed in the movement, through the use of the internet, community activities and the mass media. The reason for this was the increased tobacco usage by teenagers in New Jersey. After the creation of the movement, the role of PR was to position it as cool, hip, active and exciting to teenagers, create more awareness about it and to strenghten the participation of teens in the movement. The overall objective was of course the reduction of teen smokers, to a substantial percentage.

The strategy that Fathers for Justice have been using involves mainly the press. They have been creating awareness about what they support through publicity and by exercising pressure on the system. “Over the years, Fathers 4 Justice has hit the headlines with attention-grabbing stunts by campaigners such as storming the Big Brother house, causing traffic chaos by protesting on the busy M4, throwing eggs at Tony Blair, scaling St Paul’s Cathedral, and famously dressing as Batman and Robin to hold a roof-top demonstration in Downing Street”. [2]
 
“Agitators of many persuasions discovered that publicity could help change the nation’s thinking. By relying mainly on appeals to public sentiment, groups such as the antivivisectionists, the American Peace Party and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union met with varying degrees of success. Leaders of the women’s suffrage movement publicized their cause at the 1876 Centennial celebration in Philadelphia” staging a demonstration on the 4^th of July to protest that the have not yet won their rights as citizens.

“The function of a civil resistance is to provoke response, and we will continue to provoke until they respond or they change the law”.
                                                                                                               Gandhi

Activists, other than their “belligerent attitude toward authority, are characterized by a willingness to take big risks, and a commitment to pursue small, spontaneous moments of truth. Opportunities to act boldly present themselves every day and maybe even every hour”. Fathers for justice, a new British rights movement, supports a child’s right to see both parents and grandparents. The group believes that “Britain is needlessly creating a nation of children without parents and parents without children”. [3] The vow of F4J is a direct example of how serious activist groups are about what they do. “F4J is driven by a sense of duty, responsibility and the need to create change and bring about justice on behalf of the thousands of children and parents whose sacred bond has been broken by the Family Courts. Day in, day out, Fathers 4 Justice is hoovering up the wreckage of peoples lives, broken by the policies of the government and the Lord Chancellor’s Department. Fathers have struggled to adapt to a brave new world where they have effectively been replaced by the state as the protector and provider to their children”.[4]
Most activists believe that no fight is too small. Great triumphs are the result of small victories. “It’s fun to wrestle with titans. It’s exhilirating to throw a megacorporation like McDonald’s or Nike or Calvin Klein to the mat with the awesome momentum of its own icons and marketing type-leveraging the very brand recognition the company so painstakingly built over the years. It’s empowering to try to force a whole academic discipline like neoclassical economics to rethink its axioms”.However, when activists protest about something a corporation is doing that hurts people or damages the environment, the corporation employs Public Relations to give its ‘apology’ trying to rectify the situation, in an effort to maintain its desired status.

Whether PR or the activist group gets its message across relies principally on news coverage. Public Relations gets coverage for press conferences, receptions, interviews which are staged to get the attention of the public. For activists “the larger the movement and the bigger and more spectacular its demonstrations, the more media coverage it is likely to get, thus engendering further movement support”. But often enough, their activities flicker briefly on the evening news, and do not cause a sizeable change in the world. But when they appear frequently on the news, unforgettable images can be caused in the mind of the public. “For example, many people’s image of Greenpeace is a result of media coverage of Greenpeace activists in small boats taking on large ships to protest the activities of various companies”.[2] But this can create some problems for the activist groups, since staged events as such, can overshadow the actual purpose and message of the group.

Their main common element is problem solving. Activist groups act upon their effort to fix a situation, they believe is unjust, within the society. PR’s job is to some extent the same but within internal boundaries, mainly involving a person or an organization. PR people have to be able to find and solve a given problem, or even prevent it from even occuring. PR might be involved in research during the problem solving steps, while in activism action is the main step. Direct action as described by Lasn Kalle, in his book ‘Culture Jam’ “is the proclamation of personal independence. It happens for the first time, at the intersection of your self-consciousness and your tolerance for being screwed over. You act. You thrust yourself forward and intervene. And then you hang loose and deal with whatever comes. In this moment of decision, in that leap into the unknown, you come to life”. This is how mose activists feel, about their actions. They cannot remain ignorant when they are face to face with an injustice.

They have their objectives set, just like PR practitioners do, and they take every possible action on their part in order to achieve them, through demonstrations, sit-ins, verbal appeals, exhortations, street protests, battles with the police, some using more extreme measures than others.