Crystallizing Public Opinion: Field Notes

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Today’s Crowd by Rita Men, Ph.D. | The Power of Influence by Tom Martin | Bernays Predicted the Insurrection by Jeffrey S. Morosoff | Personal Influence: The Missing Link in Crystallizing Public Opinion by Krishnamurthy Sriramesh, Ph.D. | Bernays: Wise counselor, Clever Manipulator, or Something In-between? by Cayce Myers, P.h.D. | Bernays and Disinformation: Legacy, Conundrum, or Both? by Burton St. John III | AI is proving Bernays right. Will PR rise to the challenge? by Alex Sevigny Ph.D. APR and Martin Waxman MCM APR

Today's Crowds by Rita Men, Ph.D.

Today’s Crowds

By Rita Men, Ph.D.

Dr. Men is Professor of Public Relations and Director of Internal Communication Research in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida

1,100 words | 4-minute read

In Crystallizing Public Opinion, Edward Bernays argued that the public relations counsel’s primary role is to analyze the public they are trying to reach and interpret them to their client. And he believed that understanding the unique qualities of the “crowd mind” was key to effecting change.

Fast forward a century, and this fundamental premise still holds true. But the nature of the crowd has changed. Social media have altered how individuals express themselves, connect with one another, engage with brands and organizations, and ultimately interpret the world. Bernays observed that “crowds” don’t need to be physically aggregated, membership was more a state of mind, what Everett Dean Martin called “the peculiar mental condition … when people think and act together” (page 129 ).

Through social media, today’s “crowds” are more connected than ever in human history, easily interacting with one another and forming interconnected networks of like-minded communities. They are content creators and conversation starters, able to mobilize public opinions, foster collective actions, and advocate for social change, even if some scholars question whether this communicative power is really in their hands or in the platform’s algorithms.

Social media provides new venues to access information, including that of organizations and brands. In 2020, research by social media management platform Hootsuite found that 45 percent of global internet users turned to social media for brand information. The days when organizations could conceal information from public scrutiny are long gone.

The arrival of social media has brought about a paradigm shift in public relations, from public communication to public engagement, embracing the mindset of stakeholder-based transparency, which focuses less on what organizations want to tell but more on what their publics need to know—information that is relevant, useful, practical, and timely, without falling into the trap of data overload. Engagement also requires fluent listening, not only to gather and act on feedback but also to understand stakeholders’ latent needs and aspirations.

Social media is an unparalleled virtual space for organizations to come to life. Its informal, grassroots nature and muti-media features allow organizations and brands to personify themselves, communicating in a conversational tone and with a human touch. Many academic studies, including my own, have shown that authenticity is a powerful driving force for engaging stakeholders in the social media context. When companies are viewed as friendly, sincere, empathetic, and supportive, publics are more likely to actively engage with the organization on its own social media pages.

But the free circulation of information in the digital world also presents the challenge of filtering out mis/dis-information. To make it worse, studies show that lies travel faster than truth on social media. The most viral content tends to be highly emotional, even if incorrect or slanted. And social media algorithms tend to limit people’s exposure to diverse perspectives, formulating mind-alike groups, and reinforcing shared narratives, isolating people in now-infamous echo chambers.

Social media engagement is an interactive process that involves the co-creation of meaning, which is the key to fostering dialogue. But organizations should remember that digital publics are not isolated; they come in networks and form organic communities. In this sense, big data can be a powerful tool to identify social influencers and to develop more targeted messaging for effective engagement.

And now, less than 20 years since social media became the dominant communication channel of the crowd mind, another new technology is changing the social and economic landscape. Large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence (AI) can generate text that mimics a human’s and, combined with enough data and search capabilities, it can even appear to be capable of reasoning, following instructions and issuing commands for other systems.

Generative AI’s introduction in mid-2023, created a mini panic in some corners of the public relations industry, from concerns that machines would soon be churning out news releases with minimal human guidance to fears that it would further dissipate people’s privacy and security. The more optimistic among us held that AI promises to enhance our work efficiency, personalize our communications, and automate some rote tasks, freeing us to focus on creativity, complex issues, and strategic thinking.

Alan Murray, CEO of Fortune Media, predicted generative AI “is likely to have the most profound impact on the business world of any technology since the PC.” Others worry that, following the rule of garbage in, garbage out, AI is likely to submerge the world in even more biased judgments, incorrect information, and misleading reports.

Bernays, who was largely dependent on newspapers to reach the public when this book was written, would be thrilled by AI’s capabilities. Combining generative AI with sophisticated data mining will give public relations practitioners the ability to deliver messages to individuals with sniper-like precision. It will enable a real-time response to queries, complaints, and attacks. The downside is that it will also present thorny ethical issues, from respecting people’s privacy and ensuring their security to the ownership of intellectual property produced with AI and complying with what will probably be a crazy quilt of global regulatory regimes.

At best, highly personalized communication may sometimes feel creepy. At worst, it could contribute to even more tribalism and division. Public relations counselors need to be ready to help address the ethical implications of AI, especially in communications. When does targeting people’s emotional hot buttons move from persuasion to manipulation and coercion? And what happens when the guy on the next barstool or the kid trolling the internet from his mother’s basement gets his hands on the technology?

The newest generations of public relations professionals are born digital natives. Social media is a natural part of their lives. But they too will be challenged by these emerging technologies. No technology is perfect. Yet, every technological innovation pushes society forward in some way. Part of our job as PR professionals is to ensure our use of these new technologies is pushing society in the right direction. To that end, we should be open-minded and adaptive, keep abreast of technological developments, and equip ourselves with the knowledge, tools, and skills to seize the opportunities they offer and address the challenges they represent.

Although communication paradigms have evolved with changing technologies, many fundamental principles still hold true. Solving client problems on social media still requires clearly defining the problem, setting goals and objectives, understanding and segmenting target audiences, selecting the appropriate digital channels, developing creative content that resonates with those whom we want to reach, and measuring and evaluating the outcomes to continually improve and document success. As a technological tool, after all, social media—even fortified with generative AI—is not meant to replace traditional channels, such as face-to-face, but offer another dimension, or a new means to understanding today’s crowds.

The Power of Influence by Tom Martin

The Power of Influence

By Tom Martin, Founder, The Martin Center for Mentorship in Communication, The College of Charleston

Before founding the Martin Center for Mentorship in Communication, at the College of Charleston, Martin was a senior public relations executive at ITT and Fed Ex. He is also co-author of “An Overview of the Public Relations Function.”

1,200 words | 5-minute read

I began teaching as an Executive in Residence at the College of Charleston in 2007. That was the year Apple launched its iPhone. It was also when Facebook essentially became available to anyone with an email address, ushering in a period of explosive growth and ubiquitous usage for the social platform. How the world has changed in the sixteen years since.

Edward Bernays died twelve years before these Promethean moments, but he would have understood their significance—and the changes they would spark—just as he understood the significance of motion pictures, radio, and television in shaping global culture in prior years. What Bernays realized, articulated, and practiced was the power of influence. He knew that if you could get a message, or better yet an endorsement, emanating from powerful figures in the entertainment, sports, or political fields, you could use their influence to move the masses in almost any direction you wanted.

In Crystalizing Public Opinion, Bernays writes: “The public relations counsel must lift startling facts from his whole subject and present them as news. He must isolate ideas and develop them into events so that they can be more readily understood and so that they may claim attention as news.” It sounds like it was written yesterday, rather than in the 1920s.

Though Bernays missed the 21st Century by five years, he would have been totally comfortable observing today’s social media influencers at work. Whether guiding hungry diners to the hottest new restaurant, or convincing young mothers that vaccines are inherently dangerous, the new cadre of social media influencers has grown more powerful than journalists, politicians, and trade associations in shifting opinion and driving behavior.

Bernays understood the dark side of influence, just as he understood its potential for positive change. He knew that manipulating people using the basic tenets of psychology—fear of failure, wanting to belong, jealousy, greed—wasn’t particularly difficult. The trick was deciding in what direction and for what purpose you wanted to manipulate them.

What I see in my students is a general acceptance of both the presence and power of influencers. In their view, they would rather make purchasing or advocacy decisions based on people they have come to know and trust, rather than organizational spokespeople who in their view are simply being paid to shill. One could argue that the influencers are in it for the money too, but to my students the difference is that the influencers must earn the trust of their audience by consistent advocacy developed and effectively conveyed in a compelling way over months or even years.

When my students write and speak about influencers, they tend to focus on celebrities, such as Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Harry Styles, or Lizzo. This is not unlike Bernays’ use of Hollywood actors, political figures, athletes, and others to legitimize or popularize products or causes he was endorsing.

My students are impressed when companies demonstrate what they view as authentic behavior. For example, Nike’s support of Colin Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter movement has been controversial and has led some customers to abandon the brand. But most of my students applaud Nike for showing courage in publicly standing behind the athlete, and the company’s sales have consistently grown since they first used Kaepernick in their advertising in 2018.

My students also praise companies that take on social issues within their own industry. For example, some fashion and beauty companies have actively tried to defeat the stereotype that all women must be thin to be attractive. They applaud brands like the lingerie company, Savage X Fenty, and its founder, the singer Rihanna, for featuring women of all shapes and sizes in its advertising.

But my students also wonder how some smart and successful companies can be so tone deaf in addressing these issues. They still mock Pepsi for its widely ridiculed commercial featuring Kendall Jenner appearing to quell a riot and promote racial harmony by offering a Pepsi to a uniformed police officer.

Young people notice inconsistencies in corporate and organizational behavior. They point to the NFL’s reluctance to address the mental and physical well-being of its players. This came to a head when Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa suffered n apparent concussion yet was allowed to continue playing in that game and a subsequent one. This, even though over three hundred NFL players have been diagnosed with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), widely thought to be caused by repeated head trauma throughout their playing careers. For many of my students, this is one more demonstration that the incessant demand for growth and profitability among most organizations often leads to poor decisions.

We spend a great deal of time in class focusing on the concept of authenticity. As they think about the concept, in the age of Instagram, Tik Tok and ChatGPT, my students focus on how a company’s stated values match its actions and behavior. After the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, for example, many companies were quick to endorse the Black Lives Matter movement and speak out about racial injustice. Yet when Tyre Nichols was murdered in Memphis less than three years later, most companies remained silent. Perhaps it was a case of social injustice fatigue, but it led many of my students to question the sincerity of the corporate responses to such tragedies.

My students also see the inherent contradiction when companies profess to be committed to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies, for example, and then proceed to lay off tens of thousands of employees in completely insensitive ways. Companies can produce glossy ESG reports that tout their investment in reducing carbon emissions. But when they announce a workforce reduction during a quarterly earnings call, they rarely speak about the steps they are taking to reduce the human impact on the affected employees. That the stock market reaction to layoffs is almost always positive isn’t lost on anyone, especially the current and former employees of these companies.

I think Bernays would have found this debate completely relevant to the issues he raised in his writings. When he advised companies on how to change public opinion—whether on a product or a cause—he did so with the full recognition that actions speak louder than words.

Bernays has many critics, and I certainly don’t agree with some of the positions he took. But I remind myself that hindsight is 20/20. It is easy now to question opinions and beliefs that were formulated a century ago. I believe that by studying Bernays and his writings, the students of today can gain an enhanced understanding of the relationship between psychology and persuasion. They can observe the power of social media influencers with a more informed appreciation. The channels of influence may have changed drastically, but the reasons influence matters have not. The better we understand those who seek to influence us, the better able we will be to avoid being manipulated by them.

Bernays Predicted the Insurrection by Jeffrey S. Morosoff

Bernays Predicted the Insurrection

By Jeffrey S. Morosoff

Jeffrey Morosoff is chair of the Department of Journalism, Media Studies, and Public Relations at The Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University.

1,000 words | 4-minute read

The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was foretold by Edward Bernays a century ago in this very book.

It is widely understood that following the loss of the 2020 presidential election, the soon-to-be-former president Donald Trump worked publicly and privately to challenge the results and exhorted his supporters to protest and reflect his statements of foul play. “Stop the steal” was the battle cry, which was no more momentously reflected than when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of the Electoral College votes.

The people who participated in the attack were driven by a sense of anger and frustration, and a belief their voices were not being heard. When Trump lent his own voice to their anger, which was considerably magnified by both his position of power and its supporting media messages, they were driven to take extreme action. These people may not have started their day intending to do what they did. Many were law-abiding Americans who got caught up in the passion of the moment.

A century ago, this book effectively provided the template for public relations strategies that remain extraordinarily relevant today. But Bernays also gave us a cynical view of human nature which noted how a few people in leadership roles could strategically manipulate the masses. “The mental equipment of the average individual consists of a mass of judgments on most of the subjects which touch his physical or mental life,” Bernays wrote. “These judgments are the tools of his daily being and yet they are his judgments, not on a basis of research and logical distinction, but for the most part dogmatic expressions accepted on the authority of his parents, his teachers, his church, and of his social, economic and other leaders (page 82).”

Of course, Bernays was hardly the first to observe human decision-making and “group-think” as emotional and ill-informed. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare portrayed common people as an “unsophisticated mob,” easily influenced by others, particularly those in charge. In The Prince, Machiavelli noted, “The temper of the multitude is fickle” and easily influenced. Bernays’s uncle and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud wrote, “A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty, and the-improbably does not exist for it. It thinks in images, which call one another up by association, and whose agreement with reality is never checked by any reasonable function.”

Just a few years after the publication of Crystallizing Public Opinion, Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who was said to have kept a copy of Bernays’s book in his library, used Freud and Bernays’s research and observations about influencing human behavior to advance his own goals. “Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will,” Goebbels said. “Arguments must therefore be crude, clear, and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. There is no need for propaganda to be rich in intellectual content. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.”

Bernays believed the right message delivered in the right way to the right audience was the most effective way to sway public opinion. While obvious to communicators today, these connected lines were not so clearly drawn a century ago.

Today’s media, particularly online and social media are dominated by so-called influencers, individuals who gather followers by providing relatable advice, reviews, opinions, and objections. The most successful social media influencers of the early 2020s have hundreds of millions of followers, while even those with as few as a thousand to 10,000 followers, the “nano-influencers,” can monetize their online presence by promoting products, services, and ideas to their micro-targeted audiences. While most influencers have good, if not self-aggrandizing or self-enrichment, intentions, some use their influence for disreputable goals.

But is it credible to suggest January 6th could have happened if social media had not been invented?

It takes very little time when scrolling through social media platforms to observe how ignorant people can be. These platforms often attract individuals who create alternate identities to anonymously reflect their political points of view. The general facelessness that comes with posting online allows individuals to share insults, lies, tropes, and misinformation. Examples of such slanted social media interactions probably number in the billions. Online “discussions” and “debates” are rarely thoughtful or filled with measured, provable facts; more often a perfectly straightforward post will be followed by foolish, foul, misleading, and/or deceptive comments, usually designed to rile up emotions.

Of course, social media are not the only source of misinformation. Much of their content is sourced from larger media concerns, among them politically charged “news” outlets including Fox News and NewsMax. When Fox was sued for defamation by voting equipment manufacturer Dominion, the discovery process revealed the network had purposefully perpetuated the falsities of a stolen election when it clearly knew otherwise, simply for the sake of supporting its ratings and pleasing its followers.

Fox’s commentators and their imitators serve as case studies supporting Bernays’ suggestion that “persons who have little knowledge of a subject almost invariably form definite and positive judgments upon that subject (page 83),” and these judgments most often come from those with the power to communicate. “Some analysts believe that the public has no opinions except those which various institutions provide ready made for it,” he wrote (page 114). “People accept the facts which come to them through existing channels . . . They have neither the time nor the inclination to search for facts that are not readily available to them (page 198).”

When facts are skewed, altered, and spun—or just plain created—and then presented to ignorant people with little objectivity or interest, those easily led will often initiate and participate in reprehensible actions. This is how events such as what occurred on January 6, 2021 are bred, nurtured, and executed. As Bernays wrote, “By the substitution of words for acts, the demagogues in every field of social relationship can take advantage of the public (page 231).” The evidence of his thoughtful words is, sadly, all around us.

Personal Influence: The Missing Link in Crystallizing Public Opinion

By Krishnamurthy Sriramesh, Ph.D.

Dr. Sriramesh is Professor of Public Relations at the University of Colorado, Boulder

1,450 words | 6-minute read

Edward Bernays, truly a pioneer and trailblazer, was also a product of his time. This is evident in his presentation of public opinion in this book (Part II, Chapter 4), where the focus is on humans as a mass of people rather than as individuals. The chapter’s title—“The Group and Herd”—reinforces my conclusion, as does Bernays’s emphasis on mass-mediated communication. Practitioners and scholars harbored this same misperception of public relations well into the latter part of the 20th century.

Mass communication admittedly plays a significant role in the way public relations influences public opinion around the world. But I contend that focusing only on mass communication overlooks the role of interpersonal influence in the practice. Ironically, in this book, Bernays was studious to speak of himself in the third person as “the public relations counsel.” That reticence extended to the personal relationships he cultivated. For example, in this book, it was simply “a physician” who did the survey on healthy breakfasts, not Dr. A. L. Goldwater, his former boss at the Medical Review of Reviews. The same “physician” later helped promote an article in Cosmopolitan magazine, a Bernays client. His autobiography on the other hand suggests he understood the importance of cultivating and using personal relationships because it is replete with stories of all the prominent people who were friends before they became clients or, in many cases, influential third-party endorsers for whatever cause he was promoting. For example, one of the first people he persuaded to join the Sociological Fund committee to produce “Damaged Goods” was the New York City District Attorney, a friend of his father’s. However, Crystallizing Public Opinion, the object of this critique, does not include any dimension of personal influence suggesting that he may have realized its importance later in his professional career.

Scholars in other domains of communication discussed personal influence decades before public relations researchers and even defined the term. Sociologists Everett Rogers and George Beal (1958) defined personal influence as “those communications contacts which involved a direct face-to-face exchange between the communicator and communicated” (page 329). Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld (1955) highlighted the importance of personal influence in consumer decision making stating that “Personal contact again has considerably greater influence than any other media” (page 180). Their study proposed that the efficacy of mass media messages was influenced by opinion leaders whose personal networks and influence clearly affected how media messages are perceived and interpreted by audiences. This is popularly known now as the two-step-flow model of mass communication and, as this book shows, Bernays was practicing it before it was a theory.

Scholarly discussions about the use of personal influence in public relations began only in the late 1980s with a study I conducted in India, which was followed by similar studies in Taiwan and Greece. Since those early studies, public relations scholars have made only sporadic references to personal influence even though public relations practitioners the world over use it extensively as noted by numerous authors. For example, Bob Dilenschneider, known as the “Dean of American PR counselors,” devoted a whole chapter of his 1990 book on power and influence to “favor banks,” describing how public relations practitioners build relationships with key stakeholders such as journalists by doing favors—a sort of quid pro quo activity that was also described in studies from Asia.

At the dawn of the new millennium, public relations scholars started viewing public relations as relationship management. For the next decade or so, Organization-Public Relationship (OPR) theory became the focus of research into factors that explain good relationships. But this research ignored the relevance of the individual, focusing almost exclusively on collectives such as institutions and segmented audiences.

Organizations do not build relationships. Individuals (organizational managers) do so on behalf of the organization. How well an individual does this depends on the individual’s own experiences and cultural upbringing. Further, contrary to popular perception, relationships are not built exclusively through verbal (including symbols) and nonverbal communication. Culture, which anthropologist Edward Hall so aptly characterized as the “silent language,” is probably as powerful and effective a communicator as one may find anywhere in the world.

Research from different parts of the world tells us that personal influence depends largely on social capital, which is determined by culture. Humans find comfort in a sense of “belonging” to a group, clan, caste, religious sect, etc., which is also very culture specific. Empirical evidence shows that the informal links of a culture’s social groupings often serve as catalysts for stronger professional ties. Such groupings often occur automatically, and communication becomes secondary because a “bond” already exists between the respective individuals. It is inescapable that as humans we seize any opportunity to gain leverage over a competitor, and personal influence is often the informal “shortcut” to significant advantage. While the way personal influence is built or leveraged may differ from culture to culture, its presence is common across societies.

Personal influence also plays a key role in giving the communication function legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of senior managers — the dominant coalition that controls an organization. Our research from around the world has shown that in addition to knowledge and experience, personal influence provides the PR manager access to, and influence over, senior managers. As an expert prescriber, a seasoned PR practitioner with personal influence helps elevate communication to a strategic function rather than merely a publicity-oriented technical one.

An empowered PR function also helps the organization by aligning its policies and actions with the expectations of external stakeholders, such as reporters, public officials, and activists. Every PR practitioner, at one time or another, has socialized with these stakeholders to increase their personal influence with them. We saw a similar example in Japan where PR practitioners used the term “nommunication” to refer to the habit of cultivating good relationships with journalists during ‘nomu’ sessions (drinking sessions). In another study we conducted in Shanghai (China), we found personal influence—guanxi—to be the dominant activity for PR practitioners.

As a noun, the Chinese term Guanxi denotes a state in which human beings are connected to each other. Several studies in Chinese societies have confirmed the presence of guanxi in almost every business transaction including public relations. Giving gifts and doing favors are also frequently used tactics for building personal influence by practitioners around the world. In a study we conducted in South Korea, we found that in addition to socializing over meals and dinners, PR practitioners gave Dduk Guk (money for Korean sweets) to build personal influence with strategic publics such as journalists and government officials. The use of personal influence is not limited to PR practitioners in Asia. A study I conducted with my colleague Chiara Valentini revealed that Italian practitioners use their social networks extensively to gain professional leverage.

As noted earlier, scholars have offered trust as a key factor affecting organization-public relationships. My colleague Ivana Monnard and I found interpersonal trust to be the primary factor leading to the landmark peace agreement between the Government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) after more than 50 years of bloody warfare. Personal influence was at the heart of that trust-building, including the involvement of the Colombian president’s brother. Interpersonal trust building, which took years of hard work and included two interlocutor nations (Norway and Cuba), proved to be the primary factor in bringing these warring sides to the negotiating table and then toward the landmark peace agreement ending half a century of bloody conflict.

Bernays redefined public relations as interpreting the public to the client and the client to the public (page 61). He elevated press agentry to a higher-level management function. And although he didn’t explicitly spell it out in this book or others, there is little question he understood counseling as the exercise of personal influence. It is key to organization-public relationships, as well as to the process of building public opinion. Simply put, “crystallizing public opinion” is often more effectively done at the interpersonal level, which then translates to the mass level.

References

Dilenschneider, R. L. (1990). Power and influence: Mastering the art of persuasion. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Hall, E. T. (1973). The silent language. New York: Anchor Books.
Katz, E., & Lazersfeld, P. F. (1955). Personal influence. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Monnard, I., & Sriramesh, K. (2019). Public relations for peacebuilding: Case study from Colombia. Corporate Communication: An International Journal. 25(1), pp. 48–66.
Rogers, E. M., & Beal, G. M. (1958). The importance of personal influence in the adoption of technological changes. Social Forces, 36(4), pp. 329-335.
Sriramesh, K. (1988). Toward a cross-cultural theory of public relations: Preliminary evidence from India. Presented at the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Policy, Research and Development in the Third World, Myrtle Beach, SC. Nov.
Valentini and Sriramesh. “Personal” influence in “public” relations practice: Evidence from Italy. Presented at the 30th International Public Relations Symposium, Lake Bled, Slovenia. (2023).

Bernays: Wise counselor, Clever Manipulator, or Something In-between? by Cayce Myers, P.h.D.

Bernays: Wise counselor, Clever Manipulator, or Something In-between?

By Cayce Myers, Ph.D.

Dr. Myers, Ph.D. is the Director of Graduate Studies and Professor at the Virginia Tech School of Communication.

1,200 words | 5-minute read

“The counsel on public relations not only knows what news value is, but knowing it, he is in a position to make news happen. He is a creator of events.” —Crystallizing Public Opinion, page 281.
“The public relations counsel owes to his client is the negative duty—that he must never accept a retainer or assume a position which puts his duty to the groups he represents above his duty to his own standards of integrity—to the larger society within which he lives and works.”
—Crystallizing Public Opinion, pages. 305

Public relations is ever present, important, necessary, strategic, multidimensional, creative, clever, compassionate, ethical, and practiced by very smart and able counselors. This is the description of the field provided by Edward Bernays in this landmark book. The two quotes above reveal the complex philosophical tension in Bernays’s view of PR. On the one hand, public relations’ power stems from a practitioner’s ability to create news. On the other, that power has to be wielded only for public good.

In many ways, Bernays’s style of public relations can best be described in the modern term “thought leadership.” For him, public relations represents advocacy of a client’s perspective for the betterment of mankind. Bernays summed up his view that any differences of opinion about what that means depends on your perspective, when he wrote:

There is uniformity of opinion in this country upon many issues. When this uniformity accords with our own beliefs, we call it an expression of the public conscience. When, however, it runs contrary to our beliefs we call it regimentation of the public mind and are inclined to ascribe it to insidious propaganda (page 91).

So, is Bernays’s philosophy of public relations that of a wise counselor or a manipulator? And, perhaps more important, are Bernays’s hundred-year-old ideals still relevant today? The answer lies in understanding Bernays’s perception of public relations.

For Bernays, public relations is far removed from the concept of purely promotional messages. For him, public relations is a tool to move society forward. His views were rooted in his experience on the Committee for Public Information (CPI) where, as a young practitioner, he was part of a concerted effort to justify U.S. entry into the first world war in the name of the Wilsonian ideal to “make the world safe for democracy.” The CPI’s goal was to galvanize public opinion through multidimensional communications—some ethical, others not. However, Bernays’s experience in the CPI had a profound impact on him. He saw public relations as a high stakes, high rewards endeavor to “crystallize public opinion” for the public good.

To Bernays, the marketplace of ideas does not, by itself, ensure the best ideas rise the top. Instead, he saw it as a crowded, hectic square where disparate groups push their agendas toward an uneasy public, and where the press, particularly editors, used their bully pulpits as a confirmatory mechanism for frequently low-brow and anti-intellectual sentiments. The result is an uninformed and undereducated public whose desire for tabloid information is satisfied at the expense of real news. Bernays wrote, “The press, the lecturer, the screen and the public lead and are led by each other” (page 111).

Because of this interdependent relationship of public and press, Bernays thought public relations was an indispensable profession that would galvanize public opinion in favor of new ideas. The public relations counsel interprets “the public to his client” and helps interpret “his client to the public,” he wrote. As a “pleader to the public of a point of view,” the public relations counsel advocates on behalf of his client. This is no small task. Bernays recognized that the public has a built-in rejection of the innovative, writing “intolerance is almost inevitably accompanied by a natural and true inability to comprehend or make allowance for opposite points of view” (p. 86). The public relations counsel has to understand the mechanisms of the public mind in order to change it. That means PR professionals have to understand stereotyping, the creation of news, the biases of the public and institutions, and the ways the individual is simultaneously influenced and protected by “the herd” (page 125).

In analyzing Bernays, readers should recognize the full spectrum in which he believed public relations operated. Public relations could be used to change the public mind about mundane products like hair nets and cigarettes, but it could also influence attitudes and beliefs about high minded ideals like global governance, government accountability, and peace. Crystallizing Public Opinion shows that while public relations could make bacon a breakfast staple, it could also bring about international recognition of a new nation. Achieving this, Bernays wrote, required the public relations counsel to be “first of all a student” whose “field of study is the public mind” (page 56). Because of that, Bernays believed public relations work requires practitioners to be highly skilled at psychographic communication that could appeal to a highly complex and heterogeneous society. This means public relations counsel has to understand society’s group psychology to find unifying ideas, while working within its unchangeable structures.

But understanding the public mind is only half of the goal. Public relations counselors also need a technique to change it. They need to understand how to influence the media to produce content that can impact the public mind. But Bernays also recognized public opinion was not so simple as to be moved solely by a top-down approach. Well placed press coverage would not result in wholesale attitudinal change among even a slim majority of the public. Good public relations counsel needed to leverage the groupthink, biases, stereotyping, prejudices, insecurities, morals, interests, and needs of society to change public opinion for a client’s benefit.

So where does this leave Bernays as a figure? Is he wise counsel, manipulative, or both? Looking at his work, it seems the answer lies in one’s own perspective or bias. Bernays considered public opinion the product of a negotiated process in which public relations practitioners play an essential role by crafting a particular perception of reality. Bernays also believed this advocacy is rooted in an ethical obligation to the public to challenge conventional norms, and that it is this opposition to society’s “fixed point of view” that causes public relations counsel to be criticized (p. 296).

Bernays’s work in 1923 is relevant in 2023 because it speaks to universal truths about individuals, groups, and society. He demonstrates the complex process by which public attitudes are shaped, and he advocates in favor of public relations’ role in shaping societal discourse on a range of topics. Reading Crystallizing Public Opinion 100 years after its first printing, it is striking how contemporary Bernays’s analysis of the press, the public, and PR seems. The modern public relations practitioner is, in many ways, the product of Bernays’s view of the field. So, whether he is a counselor or manipulator distorts the real question—is his work still relevant? In short, Edward L. Bernays’s writing is not only relevant; it’s indispensable.

Bernays and Disinformation: Legacy, Conundrum, or Both? by Burton-St.-John-III-Ph.D.

Bernays and Disinformation: Legacy, Conundrum, or Both?

By Burton St. John III

Burton St. John, III, is Professor of Public Relations and Director of the Corporate Communications Master’s Program at the University of Colorado – Boulder.

1,800 words | 9-minute read

I’ve always found Edward Bernays to be a fascinating persona. When I was learning about the profession as a young public relations person in the early 1990s, it was impossible to avoid his legacy. Bernays’s influence was a key component of PRSA study materials. But historical accounts vary on whether Bernays should be canonized as a vital articulator of the importance of public relations or villainized because he was an elitist and a manipulator.

My take is that the assessments of Bernays tend to vary widely because the man’s persona spoke louder than who he may actually have been. For example, when I was about halfway through my doctoral studies, I took a class in biographies. I had this grand notion I would be able to find some insights into whether Bernays really played a significant role in the Light’s Golden Jubilee celebration.[1] My thinking in 2002 was that some senior people who could provide observations about Bernays’s role in the Jubilee must still be alive. To start my queries, I called Burson-Marsteller and asked to speak to Harold Burson. To my surprise, I was patched right into his office. I asked Burson what he thought about the legitimacy of Bernays’s claim regarding the Jubilee.

“Oh, I never had much interaction with him,” said Burson.

I still tried to ease into some discussion about Bernays and the Jubilee. “Well, I’m thinking you may have met him at some meetings.”

“I did.”

“Then, what, if anything, did he ever say about his role regarding the Jubilee?” I asked. “Some of his critics maintained he didn’t do that much.”

“All I can say is, I never much could stand him,” said Burson. “He was a consistent braggart.”

I told Burson I appreciated his observation and hung up. I had encountered the dark side of Bernays’s reputation. There wasn’t going to be any substantive discussion about Bernays and the Jubilee because his persona loomed so large.

In the years since, I’ve heard similar comments about Bernays from other practitioners and scholars. There appears to be a tendency to lionize or despise him because of the persona he built. There’s an irony here: the person who, in 1923, published this book – the first book on public relations in the U.S. – and taught the first university-level course on public relations that same year, appears to have a reputation that could “disinform” individuals about what he was intending to get across about the field of public relations.

Bernays was aware of the power of disinformation. He carefully touched upon it in Part I Chapter 3 of this book, where he offers that the emerging role of the public relations person is to be a “special pleader,” making the analogy that the public relations person is like an attorney representing his client. That analogy, however, brings to mind the unsavory aspects of the lawyer’s role: spinning information so the client can prevail under the law. Bernays clarified early in the chapter that this was not his understanding of the public relations person. To him, the spinner of disinformation was the publicity agent of the early 1900s, what he called “the circus advance-man and [the] semi-journalist promoter of small-part actresses” (page 56). The public relations person was different, he said. This new professional was “bound to accomplish general constructive good” and, in doing so, “will make us forget that ingratiating though insidious individual, the publicity man” (page 55).

In the years since he wrote these words, however, Bernays has come under criticism by both scholars and other observers for advancing the interests of his clients above his stated ideal of the public relations person as a “constructive force in the community.” For one, it was clear, after this book’s publication, and then Bernays’s second book Propaganda, that journalists didn’t buy his view of the public relations person. The Critic and Guide said, in its May 1929 issue, that he did not account for “the futility, the wastefulness, the immorality [and] the occasional anti-social results” of public relations. “To persuade people to buy things that they do not want ... what an occupation!” it said. Decades later, observers were still interrogating Bernays’s legacy as one of disinformation and manipulation. In 2013, scholar Thomas Bivens pointed out in an American Journalism article that, for Bernays, “a public relations counsel must believe that his potential client’s cause is legitimate and not antisocial—and that’s all” (page 517). Bivens rightly points out that such a stance is overly simplistic, allowing the public relations person to justify pursuing routes—some unethical—that allow them to find expedient approaches, such as disinformation, to serve their paymaster.

With the advent of a large-language model artificial intelligence (AI) platform called “ChatGPT” in the Fall of 2022, one can now, scrape the internet for information and perspectives concerning Bernays. I did exactly this in March 2023, providing various questions to ChatGPT.

My first inquiry asked ChatGPT to tell me about Bernays’s legacy. It pointed out that Bernays’s legacy had both positive and negative aspects, interestingly enough, following a “rule of three” for each. On the positive side, it said that Bernays “was one of the first individuals to understand and utilize the power of public relations in shaping public opinion.” Additionally, it said that he was one of the first to apply “human behavior and motivation” to public relations and that he championed public health campaigns (critics of Bernays’s use of the Torches of Freedom in 1929 to advance smoking for women would likely question this claim).

On the negative side, it said that he used public relations to manipulate people’s “emotions and desires” to support his clients, that he was a “strong proponent of consumerism,” creating demand “for products that people did not necessarily need,” and (here’s that health aspect again) that he was unethical by linking the selling of cigarettes to women’s push for the vote.

It’s apparent that ChatGPT was pulling from major observations about Bernays (none of it sourced). And although it accurately revealed a mixed bag, it also uncovered concerns that Bernays, for lack of better words, selectively shaped information that was conveyed to stakeholders.

I pursued this further by asking if Bernays’s methods contributed to the widespread disinformation we witness today. Interestingly, ChatGPT maintained that Bernays’s approaches “were not inherently malicious or deceitful” (again, some critics have maintained that deceit was endemic in his approaches) and added that “it is difficult to directly link his work to the current plague of mis- and dis-information.” But it then backed away from this assertion slightly by adding, “Bernays’s techniques have been adopted and adapted by many different groups and individuals, including those with less benign intentions” especially through social media platforms that spread conspiracy theories.

It is evident, for reasons I’ll soon point out, why ChatGPT appeared ambivalent about Bernays’ss legacy regarding disinformation. So I asked it to approximate some empathy regarding Bernays by asking it what it thought Bernays’s take would be on the current spread of bad information in the public sphere. It said, in part, if Bernays were alive today

he might argue that misinformation and disinformation are nothing new, and that they have always been part of the public discourse. He might also point out that propaganda and manipulation are not inherently bad but can be used for good purposes as well as bad. For example, he might argue that efforts to counter disinformation and promote accurate information about public health, climate change, and other important issues are justifiable and even necessary for the well-being of society ... Overall, it is difficult to say with certainty what Bernays would think about the problems of misinformation and disinformation today, as his views on these issues were complex and often contradictory.

This ambiguity is not only about the man, but about ChatGPT’s algorithm. Despite current hyperbolic reactions about AI chatbots, they are not sentient. Therefore, they cannot (at least for the foreseeable future) provide clear conceptual, abstract analysis. Instead, they provide representations, not conceptions, of the world of knowledge. Why is this important? Because to know where we’re going, we need to understand where we’ve been. As we continue to offload representations of the world to algorithms, we run the risks that chatbots will provide this kind of “maybe this, maybe that” information to us, obscuring that we need to do conceptual analysis. The concern here is that ChatGPT, instead, deadens a conceptual understanding that those who read Bernays understand – that misinformation and disinformation, to Bernays, was the occasional price to pay for the leadership offered by the enlightened elite who know how to gain the public’s attention.

As Stuart Ewen reported in A Social History of Spin, not long before his death, Bernays told him, “A good public relations man advises his client ... to carry out an overt act ... interrupting the continuity of life in some way to bring about a response” (page 18in particular, Bernays asserts that the public relations person focuses on “circumstances and events he helps to create” (page 53). Bernays allows that, in doing so, the public relations person attempts to “mould public opinion” but this is to help publics take “interest in matters of value and importance to the social, economic or political life of the community” (page 61). No wonder ChatGPT is ambivalent about how to talk about Bernays’s legacy—his “overt act” can be based either on legitimate or bogus information. And his own words reveal a bent for manipulation softened by esoteric rationalizations (who can argue with the ambiguousness of “public interest’?).

In this book—and particularly in Chapter 3 of section I—Bernays’s overall argument for public relations is that it serves a wider societal good by attempting to persuade publics with the truth. But a zealous belief in what is “true” can serve as a reality distortion field for both the client and the public relations person. Consequently, this could lead to disinformation in the equation, especially if such disinformation, to the practitioner, serves the larger good. No algorithm will clarify this further for us; we need to study his methods, analyze them, and learn. In particular, we need to better understand how Bernays’s conceptions of the special pleader in this chapter have put public relations in a peculiar spot in today’s cynical word: how can the field address powerful and elitist actors escalating their use of disinformation when the person who wrote the first book on public relations claims the field knows what’s better for you than you do? Moreover, Bernays’s argument is disjointed from long-standing American values (and myths) concerning individualism and self-improvement. Instead, public relations can move forward from Bernays flawed description of its worth by ceasing its attempts to act as a mentor to society and, instead, display more empathy to the publics it interacts with.

[1] The Light’s Golden Jubilee was held in October 1929 to celebrate 50 years since Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Although Bernays claimed a significant role in planning and promoting the event, over the decades there has been some criticism that he overclaimed his role. Critics of Bernays said such overclaiming was one of his enduring traits.

AI is proving Bernays right. Will PR rise to the challenge? by Alex Sévigny, PhD, APR, and Martin Waxman, MCM, APR

AI is proving Bernays right. Will PR rise to the challenge?

By Alex Sévigny, PhD, APR and Martin Waxman, MCM, APR

Dr. Alex Sevigny is associate professor of communications management and communication studies in the Department of Communication Studies & Media Arts at McMaster University.

Martin Waxman is a digital communications consultant, writer and LinkedIn Learning instructor. He teaches digital strategy at Schulich School of Business and McMaster University.

1,250 words | 6-minute read

“Chatbots are a marvelous invention for the public relations counsel. They enable us to converse with the public in a natural and persuasive manner, and to mold their minds according to our objectives. The public relations counsel must master this new art of chatbotry, as it offers immense possibilities for the advancement of our profession and the welfare of society. But we must also be careful not to misuse this potent instrument, as it may backfire and damage our reputation and credibility.” —Edward Bernays-Bot

Of course, Edward Bernays, one of the founders and shapers of the public relations profession, never uttered those words. That was the response Bing-ChatGPT created when we asked it for a fictional Bernays quote on the subject.*

Yet, it does sound like something he might have said, had he been alive to witness the meteoric rise of large language model (LLM), a type of generative artificial intelligence (generative AI). Bernays could not have predicted that machines could be trained to find the relationships between the words in billions of lines of unlabelled text and approximate an understanding sufficient to answer questions, write poems, and identify sentiments in reviews. However, given that as a fact, we believe Bernays could have predicted the buzzing anxiety many PR pros are experiencing, thinking of all the ways artificial intelligence might put them out of a job. Mostly, he would have seen the coming of AI not as a cause to panic, but as a strategic opportunity.

The reasoning behind this conjecture is that Bernays had a vision for PR as a relationship, branding, and image management function, whose strategies to shape the public perceptions and opinion of brands are inspired by research in the social sciences and humanities.

This was a very different approach from Ivy Lee, who defined public relations as largely a service function interfacing with media. In fact, in his book Trust Signals, Scott Baradell, an agency founder and long-time practitioner, contends that when early communicators had two paths to follow—Lee’s road to journalistic media relations and Bernays’s more nuanced, psycho-social approach—they chose to follow Lee. We think that to succeed in the world of generative AI, PR must take a more expansive, Bernaysian approach.

It can be argued that Ivy Lee approached the profession cautiously. He defined his main job as generating news coverage, a diminished scope compared to Bernays’s more ambitious point-of-view. Indeed, Bernays was a king maker, influencing the attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviors of individuals and groups for a client list that included American presidents, global corporations, and culture stars. His approach to serving clients was strategic and outcomes-based, while Lee’s was more passive. Bernays developed strategies by gaining a deep understanding of how a brand or an individual was perceived and then used the psycho-social tools at his disposal to persuade. In later life, he sought to professionalize the practice, stressing the importance of education, regulation, and the development of a rigorous body of scientific knowledge.

Consider the challenge and opportunity that artificial intelligence—large language models and other generative AI in particular—poses for communications. On the one hand, it will eliminate many jobs in public relations by vastly reducing the everyday grind of producing formulaic copy for media releases, backgrounders, and other “low attention writing tasks.” Indeed, just as Google Translate has facilitated the task of the translator, so too will generative AI facilitate the writer's craft. On the other hand, removing a significant part of the labor of writing will make PR practitioners more productive, allowing PR firms to spend more time on research, leading to more strategic, data-driven work and greater scale. So, which will it be?

We pose that PR is at the same crossroads it faced when Bernays and Lee proposed their respective visions for the profession. There is the safe route, which would see the profession largely stay away from the “hocus-pocus” of generative AI and continue to pursue a narrow band of media relations outcomes. Then there is the riskier, but potentially more profitable and vigorous route of choosing to be at the heart of the generative AI revolution that will play out in our homes, workplaces, and personal lives.

We had a preview of this choice in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when social media became mainstream as a cultural and economic driver. PR wasn’t sure what to make of this new digital arena that necessitated the integration of paid, earned, social, and owned media. The most prestigious placements, in the eyes of both clients and practitioners, continued to be in print and broadcast as venues of record. Even as these venues started their precipitous decline into “mainstream media” and then “legacy media,” PR practitioners stubbornly held them up as the gold standard, while assigning social media tasks to the most junior people in the office.

Colleagues across the corporate campus in marketing didn’t make this mistake. They saw that people were attracted to the largely oral culture that prevailed on social media. They knew the era of elite opinion shaping the opinion of the masses was over. So, marketers made the shift, while PR professionals didn't.

This historic error on the part of PR pros has had two significant consequences. First, the industry missed out on being at the centre of the largest and quickest transition in human behavior and identity in history, from physical to digital life and work. Second, strategic PR’s lack of a meaningful presence in social media contributed to the formation of a culture of misinformation, disinformation, and standards-free communication. We conjecture Bernays would have jumped at the opportunity to be part of the largest behavioral and relational experiment in human history.

Dropping the social media ball will soon seem like a footnote in communication history when compared to the changes that generative AI will usher in. The advances in computational creativity in writing, reasoning, photography, design, and video that have shocked the world in 2022 and 2023 are only the first glimmers of a new era of digital assistants, chatbots, and virtual reality that will completely blur the line between the physical and digital, between human and machine.

Personal identities will be transformed as computers accompany and represent us. Relationships—personal and professional, interpersonal and organizational—will be reshaped in a world where most of our transactional relationships will be with machines, or even between our machines and the machines of those with whom we do business. Our creativity will be augmented and enhanced exponentially by machines that produce the first draft of our creations.

This new world will bring obvious strategic, tactical, and ethical challenges. If we follow Bernays’s vision for the profession, PR should be at the centre of the AI Age, helping to shape image, relationships, current affairs conversations, and consumer preferences in ethical, truthful, inclusive, and positive ways. Who better to inform the development and deployment of generative AI than the professionals who have the empathic understanding of audiences and stakeholders, both internal and external?

The Age of AI may well see the return of Bernays’s grand vision for PR, with more formal education that integrates the creative arts, humanities, social sciences, and commerce, and possibly greater regulation. Whether it does or not will depend on the courage and boldness of our current leading practitioners and our juniors’ ambitious demands for excellence and opportunity. Generative AI is changing who we are and how we relate to each other. It is up to PR to take its place at the center of the emerging new world.

*Prompt used: Imagine you are a public relations and communications scholar with 20 years of experience and many academic publications. You are also a professor teaching a communications and data strategy class. You are speculating about what Edward Bernays, one of the founders of public relations, might have thought about chatbots as a means of persuasion and how it might change the public relations profession. Write a 30-to-50-word quote on that topic in Bernays writing style from the 1920s, 1930s or 1940s.

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