CONCEPT OF ADJUNCTS OF MASS MEDIA, DEVELOPMENT AND FUNCTIONS OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

1.0 INTRODUCTION

This unit examines the historical antecedents of Public Relations in the world over, as well as its various definitions. The unit is subdivided as
follows:

1. History/Development of Public Relations 
2. Definitions of Public Relations 
3. Philosophy and Perceptions of Public Relations 

2.0 OBJECTIVES

At the end of this unit, you should be able to:

1. explain how and why Public Relations started globally 
2. give the various definitions of Public Relations 
3. explain the guiding philosophy of Public Relations. 

3.0MAIN CONTENT

3.1 Definition and Basic Facts about Adjuncts of Mass Media

 
Adjuncts of the Mass MediaAdjuncts of the Mass Media refer to additional sources through which the mass media get information. Simply put, they are the additions to the mass media. The most popular of these adjuncts are the news agencies. Hence, we have “News Agency Journalism”. News Agency Journalism is the act of gathering and disseminating world news through the news agencies. These news agencies, which are equally referred to as “extenders”, specialize in the sourcing, processing and distributing of world news and information to other mass media organizations and non-media organizations who are referred to as subscribers. News Agencies are in different categories depending on their coverage and standards. \Below are some examples.

Examples of News Agencies include:

Associated Press	AP
United Press International	UPI
Reuters
Agence France Presse	AFP
Telegrafrioie Agentsvo Sovietskoro Soiuza	TASS
News Agency of East Germany	ADV
News Agency of West Germany	DPA
News Agency of Yugoslavia	TANJUG
News Agency of Cuba	Prensalatina
News Agency of Egypt	MENA
News Agency of Japan	Kjodo
News Agency of Indonesia	Antara
News Agency of Spain	EFE
Iraqi New Agency	INA
Indian Press Trust	IPT
Pan African News Agency	PANA
Portuguese News Agency	LUSA
Ghana News Agency	GNA
Kenya News Agency	KNA
Non-Aligned News Pool	NANP
News Agency of Nigeria	NAN

TYPES OF NEWS AGENCIES

News agencies as we know them today are of three types namely:

1. Transnational or World News Agencies
2. Continental or Regional News Agencies 
3. National News agencies. 

These agencies are classified according to their levels of operations, areas of coverage and strength of service.

 THE TRANSNATIONAL/WORLD NEWS AGENCIES

The transnational or world news agencies as the name implies, are the news agencies whose operations are on a world-wide scale. These types of agencies specialize in the gathering, processing and distribution of news on a global level. They maintain correspondents or reporters in almost all the major cities around the world. These correspondents or reporters and the advanced information technologies available to them, help the world news agencies to monitor the whole world like a village – a global village and report events and happenings the minute they happen irrespective of distance, time and magnitude of the events/happenings in question. The news agencies that fall under this type or category include:

1. Associated Press (AP) founded in 1948 and owned by newspapers in United States. 
2. United Press International (UPI) also owned by newspapers in US and a conglomerate of media organizations. The agency was founded 10 year after the establishment of AP. 
3. Reuters founded in the 19th century and owned by the British government 
4. Agence France Presse (AFP) owned by the French government and founded in the early 19th century 
5. Telegrafrioie Agentsvo Sovirtskovo Soiuza (TASS) founded around 1925 and owned by the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) 

2. THE CONTINENTAL/REGIONAL NEWS AGENCIES

The continental or Regional news agencies operate within their continents or regions. They have correspondents and subscribers in many countries of the world but their services and operations are not spread to every part of the globe. This is the major difference between the world news agencies and the regional news agencies. Whilst the world news agencies maintain correspondents and clients in all the major cities in the world, the regional news agencies only maintain correspondents and clients in their various regions or continents. Examples include:

1. The Non-Aligned News Pool (NANP)
2. Pan – African News Agency (PANA) 
3. Indian Press Trust (IPT) 
4. Tanjug of Yugoslavia 
5. Kyodo of Japan. 

3. THE NATIONAL NEWS AGENCIES

This type of agency refers to news agencies of individual countries around the world. Almost every country in the world has one form of news agency or the other, e.g. the News Agency of Nigeria. It is this news agency that is referred to as national news agency of that country. However, it must be noted that news agencies like AP, UPI, Reuters and AFP owned by US (AP & UPI), Britain and France respectively do not fall under this category or classification because of their scale or level of
operation which go beyond their individual counties. National news agencies only serve their individual countries while the AP, UPI, Reuters and AFP serve the world. Some good examples of national news agencies are:

1. News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) owned by the Nigerian government. 
2. Ghana News Agency (GNA) owned by the Ghanaian government
3. Kenya News Agency (KNA) owned by the Kenyan government 
4. Iraqi News Agency (INA) owned by the Iraqi government 
5. Middle East News Agency (MENA) owned by the Egyptian government 

3.2 Origin/Development of Public Relations

The origin of PR could be traced to the ancient Greeks, who had the idea of the “Public Will” and to the Romans, who used the expression “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” But it is generally believed to have emerged in its modern form in the United States in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. Two-prominent names also associated with the emergence of PR are Ivy
Better Lee and Edward Bernays. The former originated the concept of PR and first established PR as a vocation. The latter was the first to teach PR in a university faculty.


The initial purpose of PR was to counter scathing criticism of business companies and entrepreneurs by writers, journalist and social critics. The business people were accused of shady deals and a general lack of social responsibility. To counter this criticisms, the business companies
hired some of their former critics (the journalist in particular) to help polish poor company image. The leading journalist hired was Ivy Better Lee, a reporter for the New York Journal!

Ivy Lee enjoined his client to re-examine their business policies and practices and to correct wrong business attitudes, in order to create a public opinion and generate a more positive image in the press.

In his pursuit of effective “public relations”, Lee drew up a “declaration of principle”, spelling out the fundamental nature of PR work. Lee was the first person to be called PR councilor. He also co-founded the Parker and Lee PR Agency in 1905. PR crusade was led by an industrialist in Western Germany. Guster Mevissen was a prominent name. He proposed that public criticism of business companies should be countered by the greatest possible publicity. Another industrialist Alfred Krupp, was also known to take public relations very seriously, when he wrote to his representatives to “conduct your business enterprise in the public”

Taking a cue from the business world. The US Government set up a committee on public information to endeavor by “engineering of consent” to convince America Citizens of the need of America to be involved in the World War1”. The committee was headed by George Creel and also included Ivy Lee and Erdward Bernays. Lee and Barneys jointly published a book titled “Crystallizing Public Opinion”. Later, in 1928, Barneys published another book titled “Propaganda”


World War II further reflected the success of the First World War’s role in forming public opinion. An office of war information was established headed by Elmer Davis, a former radio newscaster, to bring public opinion more in line with the heads and pace of government.

Many government agencies from then began to have public relations department and sometimes, consultants were hired to study and interpret public opinion on sensitive issues.

The First World War also helped in the development of public relations as a profession. Many of the first PR professionals organized publicity on behalf of U.S. objectives during World War I. Some of the professionals are: Ivy Lee, Edward Bernays, John Hill, and Carl Byoir. These people got their start with the Committee on Public Information (also known as the Creel Committee). As mentioned earlier, some historians regard Ivy Lee as the first real practitioner of public relations, but Edward Bernays is generally regarded today as the profession's founder. In describing the origin of the term Public Relations, Bernays commented, "When I came back to the United States, I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace. And propaganda got to be a bad word because of the Germans using it. So what I did was to try to find some other words, so we found the words Council on Public Relations".

The development of the modern news release (also called a "press release") was credited to Ivy Lee. He espoused a philosophy consistent with what has sometimes been called the "two-way street" approach to public relations, in which PR consists of helping clients listen as well as communicate messages to their publics. In the words of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), “Public relations help an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other." In practice, however, Lee often engaged in one-way propagandizing on behalf of clients despised by the public, including Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller. Shortly before his death, the US Congress had been investigating his work on behalf of the controversial Nazi German company IG Farben.

In the 1890s when gender role reversals could be caricaturized, the idea of an aggressive woman who also smoked was considered laughable. In 1929, Edward Bernays proved otherwise when he convinced women to smoke in public during an Easter parade in Manhattan as a show of defiance against male domination. The demonstrators were not aware that a tobacco company was behind the publicity stunt.

Bernays was the profession's first theorist. A nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays drew many of his ideas from Freud's theories about the irrational, unconscious motives that shape human behaviour. Bernays authored several books, including Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), Propaganda (1928), and The Engineering of Consent (1947). Bernays saw public relations as an "applied social science" that uses insights from psychology, sociology, and other disciplines to scientifically manage and manipulate the thinking and behavior of an irrational and "herdlike" public. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society," he wrote in Propaganda. "Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."


In 1929, he orchestrated a legendary publicity stunt aimed at persuading women to take up cigarette smoking, an act that at the time was exclusively equated with men. It was considered unfeminine and inappropriate for women to smoke. Besides the occasional prostitute, virtually no women participated in the act publicly.


Bernays initially consulted psychoanalyst A. A. Brill for advice, Brill told him: "Some women regard cigarettes as symbols of freedom... Smoking is a sublimation of oral eroticism; holding a cigarette in the mouth excites the oral zone. It is perfectly normal for women to want to smoke cigarettes. Further, the first women who smoked probably had an excess of male components and adopted the habit as a masculine act. But today the emancipation of women has suppressed many feminine desires. More women now do the same work as men do.... Cigarettes, which are equated with men, become torches of freedom."

Upon hearing this analysis, Bernays dubbed his PR campaign the: "Torches of Liberty Contingent".

It was in this spirit that Bernays arranged for New York City débutantes to March in that year's Easter Day Parade, defiantly smoking cigarettes as a statement of rebellion against the norms of a male-dominated society. Publicity photos of these beautiful fashion models smoking "Torches of Liberty" were sent to various media outlets and appeared worldwide. As a result, the taboo was dissolved and many women were led to associate the act of smoking with female liberation. Some women went so far as to demand membership in all-male smoking clubs, a highly controversial act at the time.

For his work, Bernays was paid a tidy sum by George Washington Hill, President of the American Tobacco Company.

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1

Justify the place of Public Relations ‘stunt’ during war.