Why Some PR Professionals Are Furious with the Bush Administration
George W. Bush earned an MBA from Harvard University. He then ran several organizations and sat on the boards of directors of others before becoming the nation’s chief executive. With decades of management experience, it is reasonable to expect that along the way Bush would have learned the value of public relations and a little about the ethical questions central to the field.
Instead, over the course of about a week, several investigations revealed that the administration either directly paid or secretly funneled money through outside PR firms to a handful of conservative pundit/journalists in return for favorable commentary on policies the president supports. In one fell swoop, the Bush administration sullied the entire public relations profession and dragged the field down into the ranks of the Enrons, Worldcoms, and Tycos of the world.
When confronted with the multiple cases of misleading the public, Bush did what most business leaders do – acknowledge that wrongdoing took place, without ever directly apologizing, taking blame, or pointing to specific incidences. At a press conference, he declared, “We will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda.” As with much of Bush’s rhetoric, the telling analysis is in the details. The president’s defensive tone and language (“We will not be paying”) did not address the fact that his administration had already funneled taxpayer money, which is plainly wrong.
More troubling, Bush’s blanket apology attempted to sweep the issue aside without assigning blame to those within the administration who orchestrated these deals – as if admitting wrongdoing is enough punishment. This thinking has been the operational code for the administration from the start – most notably in admitting Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Bush’s years as a business executive are keenly apparent during these instances – showing remorse (hoping the public will forgive and forget), then “moving forward” with his agenda.
As the mea culpa was delivered, it seemed mainly an attempt to placate angry Democratic congressional leaders – who introduced the Federal Propaganda Prohibition Act of 2005 to outlaw such blatant attempts at manipulating public opinion. The apology certainly wasn’t the act of contrition hoped for by practitioners whose livelihood has been demeaned by the administration’s actions.
Early investigations into the rampant use of outside PR agencies by the Bush administration revealed that it awarded more than $88 million to firms in 2004, a whopping 128 percent increase from four years earlier. That is $88 million American taxpayers paid to have the administration’s advocacy forced back in their faces. Certainly, the Bush administration can outsource its public relations efforts (and justify the move with the same vindication of today’s corporate chiefs), but the unethical behavior occurs when those it hires direct covert campaigns with front groups and supposedly unbiased commentators.
So, President Bush, how do we explain these ethical lapses to the nearly 20,000 students specifically majoring in Public Relations, in addition to the countless numbers majoring in related communications fields, or the 400,000 people who are employed in PR in the United States? Public relations practitioners already battle the negative monikers of “spin” and “flack,” based on general misunderstandings of the field and the ridiculous attempts to sway public perception during political campaigns.
Public relations already carries a great deal of historical baggage. Its first practitioners were publicize-at-any-cost, sometime swindlers, who preyed on the public’s imagination with exaggerated claims and puffery. P.T. Barnum is often held up as the prime example of this kind of press agentry. Barnum staged events that were designed to garner publicity and attract spectators – hitting the public over the head with his message. This kind of huckster publicity act is still popular among pseudo-celebrities like Paris Hilton and the casts of almost all reality television shows.
As the field developed in the early twentieth century, strategic counselors, such as Ivy Ledbetter Lee and Edward Bernays, emerged from the world of journalism to help American businesses appreciate that informed two-way communications with the public had important benefits. Rather than continue the “damn the public” attitude held by the Robber Barons, many business leaders supported these early efforts at building brand awareness and loyalty.
As a result, public relations served as the backbone of successful programs ranging from World War II war bond sales to Kimberly-Clark’s campaign to teach young women about menstruation, a taboo subject for hundreds of years. Even as the profession gained a modicum of respect, public relations still had to overcome a collective insecurity complex based on its slapstick roots.
The Bush administration could have learned a great deal from the war administration of Franklin Roosevelt (particularly since he recently told C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb that he studied FDR as a history major at Yale). The public campaigns to mobilize for the war were not conducted in secret. The public understood the goals of the war effort and the administration’s open support of those campaigns. A clear transparency existed. In contrast, the Bush administration attempted to sway public opinion in an underhanded manner.
The explosion of communications technology and media outlets in the second half of the twentieth century and early years of this century have helped public relations gain a firm footing within organizations. Globalization and international expansion have also necessitated the need for professional, strategic communications between organizations and its publics.
At the same time public relations has spread into new markets with new media opportunities, its practitioners have also continued a concerted effort to prove its monetary significance to organizations. Unlike the field’s advertising and marketing brethren, who have uncovered innovative ways of measuring their value by linking their products to sales and brand management, public relations professionals have difficulty measuring the money saved by getting a story in (or keeping a bad story out) of the media, internal communications, or the value of a positive brand image.
Public relations will be plagued by questions of legitimacy in corporate America until the question of return on investment is answered, just as other staff functions have to prove their worth to organizations. This is an issue professionals and leaders in academe understand and are tackling.
What the field can’t anticipate, though, is blatant unethical shenanigans that bring the entire profession into question. The Bush Administration’s black and white worldview pits it against all opposing viewpoints, but public relations’ ethics should not be a fallen soldier in the battle.