ENGINEERING CONSENT

You have an issue that your organization needs to increase public awareness about so that they understand it and change their behaviour to support the organizational point of view. Your approach is to devise a public relations strategy with just such objectives; you implement it and later determine that you were successful. This is the heart and soul of modern PR.

In 1947, however, Edward Bernays called it ˜the engineering of consent. And he believed that this apparent manipulation of ideas could ”and indeed should ”be carried out by the intellectual elite of society, of which, in his opinion, he was one. If you subscribe to the notion that Bernays can be called the father of modern public relations, as so many North American public relations practitioners do, then this is his legacy and the premise upon which modern public relations practice has evolved. It's little wonder that PR's advocacy role has been misunderstood and maligned for years , confused as it has been with the manipulation of the public mind.

In the field of public relations, an advocate is someone who speaks or acts in defence of an organization, issue or point of view ”it is often our raison d' tre . Regardless of whether you are speaking on behalf of a bank, a hospital, a government agency or a tobacco company you are their advocate in the public's eye ”you are inextricably identified with that organization or cause for everyone who sees or hears you or even knows what you do for a living. As we shall see with our illustration, it stands to reason that you would not represent a cause in which you do not believe: it wouldn't be ethical. If you are a staunch non-smoker, for example, working in public relations for a tobacco company puts you in a distinct conflict of interest situation. And the situation only gets worse when you have to extend that role of speaking in defence of your employer or client to having to plan to persuade others to that point of view. To speak in favour of a cause or issue that you actually oppose is nothing short of lying.

Advocacy, by its very nature, almost always leads to the need for persuasion. And, in the eyes of many, persuasion equals propaganda and manipulation. That's because in PR we are spin doctors , manipulators, experts in hyperbole, exaggeration, purveyors of PR ploys and organized lying ”and that's just what they say about us every day in the newspaper.