It Is Not Just PR: Public Relations in Society

Year 2022, Volume: 5 Issue: 1, 195 - 206, 27.04.2022

Mikail Uğuş

Abstract

The public relations industry has improved during the last century. Its power of affecting people has been abused, and today public relations is being charged with gaining advantages and opportunities for the dominant powers in society. It has been used to shape people’s behavior and to get them to accept the expectations and opinions of dominant power. Public relations, whose first goal is to provide the free flow of information, has produced imaginary realities by using spin and has always violated codes of ethics. Public relations is no longer the supporter of democracy because it hinders democratic movements by controlling people’s ideas with misleading and manipulative messages and restricting freedom of speech, which is the keystone of democracy. In democratic societies, since governments do not apply force to change people’s ideas, public relations carries much weight to control what people are thinking or doing. Today, unfortunately, public relations is assigned to legitimize elites’ privileged power. Holladay and Coombs explained the deleterious effects of public relations, which change the perceptions and understandings of society from top to bottom. They criticized wrong implementations of public relations, emphasizing that these kinds of executions cause the public to misperceive public relations

Keywords

Ethics, Democracy, Society, Change, Power, Stakeholders

References

• Coombs, W.T. & Holladay S.J. (2007). It is not just PR : Public relations in society. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing.
• Bernays, E. (1928). Propaganda. Brooklyn, NY: Ig Publishing.
• Edwards, D. (1996). Burning all illusions. Massachusetts, MA: South End Press.