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Truth and Hidden Influence in the Persuasion Industries

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We start with the issue of truth and hidden influence. We will review the issues together to make the point that, when a company deliberately hides the sponsor or power behind a media message, its action very much represents a problem of truth. Leading an audience to get the wrong impression of a story by encouraging it to believe that the story had one author rather than another is very close to promoting a lie.

Critics of the persuasion industries argue that their practitioners can never really be truthful because their business is to portray people, products, and organizations purposefully in ways that do not reveal problems. Advertising and PR practitioners respond that there is nothing wrong with emphasizing the positive aspects of something, as long as what is emphasized is not demonstrably wrong. Their critics reply that it is possible to create an ad or public relations campaign that deceives even when the text in the ad is legally truthful. Think about all the ads you see in which men are attracted to women—or women are attracted to men—who use certain products. Technically, these ads are truthful because they never contend that using these products will automatically make you alluring. Still, the critics argue, there is a fundamental deception in photographs that imply over and over that material goods will make you sexually attractive.

A leading professor of public relations, Scott Cutlip, worries about the industry's problem with the truth. He admonishes that, “reality says... that the public relations counselor should be seen as the advocate... not as a dedicated purveyor of truth to serve the public interest. Many counselors serve as advocates of institutions and causes in the same way that lawyers serve clients, to put the best possible face on the facts they can, regardless of merit or truth." He adds that, because of this, “as many PR practitioners shade the truth and deal in obfuscation as purvey accurate, useful information to the public via the news media.”

Executives in the persuasion industries usually shrug off such complaints. They argue that not being able to suggest that a product will bring psychological benefits or that a company has a warm personality would seriously hamper their ability to create successful advertising and public relations campaigns. When it comes to ethics they focus instead on circumstances that can hurt them legally or economically. Can the government hold them legally liable for deception in an ad or PR campaign? Are competitors making incorrect statements about their products that are likely to hurt sales? Will unscrupulous practices by competitors lessen the credibility of their industry and prompt government investigations?

To make the rules clear and to deter government regulators from intruding on their business, industry leaders have turned to self-regulation. Most notably, they have created professional associations that develop norms for the industry and write them into codes of good practice. The American Association of Advertising Agencies and the American Advertising Federation, for example, both circulate similar standards that their members promise to follow. Among their many prohibitions are misleading price claims and misleading rumors about competitors. In a similar vein, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) compiles lists of “deceptive and misleading practices” that its members should avoid. The Public Relations Society of America also has a code of “professional standards" that includes such topics as safeguarding “the confidences of present and former clients," not engaging “in any practice which tends to corrupt the integrity of channels of communication or the processes of government,” and “not intentionally” communicating “false and misleading information.”

Some critics contend that public relations and advertising firms violate these rules every day. Moreover, no society can force a nonmember to even pay lip service to its rules. Attempts at enforcing complaints by one member against another do exist. If, for example, one advertiser believes that another advertiser is harming its products by broadcasting misleading or inaccurate commercials, the advertiser can complain to the National Advertising Division (NAD) of the Council of Better Business Bureaus. The NAD will investigate. If it finds the advertiser's work misleading, the charge is reviewed by the National Advertising Review Board (NARB), which consists of indus­try practitioners. That industry body will act as a referee and make a report on its conclusion available to the public. It will also suggest how the commercial might be changed. For the sake of self-regulation, advertisers typically agree to follow these suggestions.

Although critics of advertising point out that industry disputes over accuracy are only the tip of the iceberg of problems with the truthfulness of information, they acknowledge that at least an ad is out in the open for its audience to see. A person who sees an advertisement almost always knows that it is an ad and so can be sensitive to claims and images that may be exaggerated or are unsupportable. Public relations, in contrast, is by its very nature an activity that hides its creators from public view. That, say its critics, makes it almost impossible to examine its products for accuracy as one might examine an ad. In fact, as we noted previously, this is one of the persuasive advantages over advertising that PR practitioners cite. People naturally suspect an ad, they say, whereas in the case of PR they don’t even know it is taking place.

The negative social effects of public relations’ hidden nature can be considerable. As we have seen, many media activities today are influenced by the information subsidies that various types of public relations agencies supply. These subsidies can be as seemingly harmless as products placed by companies into entertainment or as clearly outrageous as orchestrating fake atrocity stories to sway the news media, the public, and Congress to support a war. In all cases, though, public relations practitioners are manipulating mass media content to their clients’ commercial and political benefit without letting the public know about it.

People who don't consider the impact of public relations on news and entertainment may believe what they see because they trust the news or entertainment organization that they think is the source of the story is quite different from the one that they believe instigated and interpreted it. At the same time, people who are aware of the power of PR over the mass media typically will still not be able to figure out whether or not a PR organization is behold a particular story, or how or why. The result of this inability to know may be a cynical view that everything in the media is tainted by PR and therefore is nor what it seems. In either case, the hidden nature of public relations may have an unfortunate, even corrosive, effect on the way people understand those parts of society that are outside their immediate reach.

 




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