his obligations to the public as a special pleader
it has been the history of new professions—and every profession has been at some time a new profession—that they are accepted by the public and become firmly established only after two significant handicaps are overcome. the first of these, oddly enough, lies in public opinion itself; it consists of the public’s reluctance to acknowledge a dependence, however slight, upon the ministrations of any one group of persons. medicine, even to-day, is still fighting this reluctance. the law is fighting it. yet these are established professions.
the second handicap is that any new profession must become established, not through the efforts and activities of others, who might be considered impartial, but through its own energy.
these handicaps are particularly potent in a profession of advocacy, because it is engaged in the partisan representation of one point of view. the legal profession is perhaps the most familiar example of this fact, and in this light at least a trenchant comparison may be drawn between the
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bar and the new profession of the public relations counsel.
both these professions offer to the public substantially the same services—expert training, a highly sensitized understanding of the background from which results must be obtained, a keenly developed capacity for the analysis of problems into their constituent elements. both professions are in constant danger of arousing crowd antagonism, because they often stand in frank and open opposition to the fixed point of view of one or another of the many groups which compose society. indeed it is this aspect of the work of the public relations counsel which is undoubtedly the foundation of a good deal of popular disapproval of his profession.
even mr. martin, who on several occasions in his volume talks with severe condemnation of what he calls propaganda, sees and admits the fundamental psychological factors which make the adherents to one point of view impute degraded or immoral motives to believers in other points of view. he says:44
“the crowd-man can, when his fiction is challenged, save himself from spiritual bankruptcy, preserve his defenses, keep his crowd from going to pieces, only by a demur. any one who challenges the crowd’s fictions must be ruled
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out of court. he must not be permitted to speak. as a witness to contrary values, his testimony must be discounted. the worth of his evidence must be discredited by belittling the disturbing witness. ‘he is a bad man; the crowd must not listen to him.’ his motives must be evil; he is ‘bought up’; he is an immoral character; he tells lies; he is insincere or he ‘has not the courage to take a stand’ or ‘there is nothing new in what he says.’
“ibsen’s ‘enemy of the people,’ illustrates this point very well. the crowd votes that doctor stockman may not speak about the baths, the real point at issue. indeed, the mayor takes the floor and officially announces that the doctor’s statement that the water is bad is ‘unreliable and exaggerated.’ then the president of the householders’ association makes an address accusing the doctor of secretly ‘aiming at revolution.’ when finally doctor stockman speaks and tells his fellow citizens the real meaning of their conduct, and utters a few plain truths about ‘the compact majority,’ the crowd saves its face, not by proving the doctor false, but by howling him down, voting him an ‘enemy of the people,’ and throwing stones through the window.”
if we analyze a specific example of the public relations counsel’s work, we see the workings of the crowd-mind, which have made it so difficult
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for his profession to gain popular approval. let us take, for example, the tariff situation again. it is manifestly impossible for either side in the dispute to obtain a totally unbiased point of view as to the other side. the importer calls the manufacturer unreasonable; he imputes selfish motives to him. for his own part he identifies the establishment of the conditions upon which he insists with such things as social welfare, national safety, americanism, lower prices to the consumer, and whatever other fundamentals he can seize upon. every newspaper report carrying the flavor of adverse suggestion, whether on account of its facts or on account of the manner of its writing, is immediately branded as untrue, unfortunate, ill-advised. it must, the importer concludes, it must have been inspired by insidious machinations from the manufacturers’ interests.
but is the manufacturer any more reasonable? if the newspapers publish stories unfavorable to his interests, then the newspapers have been “bought up,” “influenced”; they are “partisan” and many other unreasonable things. the manufacturer, just like the importer, identifies his side of the struggle with such fundamental standards as he can seize upon—a living wage, reduced prices to the consumer, the american standard of employment, fair play, justice. to each the contentions of the other are untenable.
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now, carry this situation one step further to the point at which the public relations counsel is retained, on behalf of one side or the other. observe how sincerely each side and its adherents call even the verifiable facts and figures of the other by that dread name “propaganda.” should the importers submit figures showing that wages could be raised and the price to the consumer reduced, their adherents would be gratified that such important educational work should be done among the public and that the newspapers should be so fair-minded as to publish it. the manufacturers, on the other hand, will call such material “propaganda” and blame either the newspaper which publishes those figures or the economist who compiled them, or the public relations counsel who advised collating the material.
the only difference between “propaganda” and “education,” really, is in the point of view. the advocacy of what we believe in is education. the advocacy of what we don’t believe in is propaganda. each of these nouns carries with it social and moral implications. education is valuable, commendable, enlightening, instructive. propaganda is insidious, dishonest, underhand, misleading. it is only to-day that the viewpoint on this question is undergoing a slight change, as the following editorial would indicate:
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“the relativity of truth,”45 says mr. elmer davis, “is a commonplace to any newspaper man, even to one who has never studied epistemology; and, if the phrase is permissible, truth is rather more relative in washington than anywhere else. now and then it is possible to make a downright statement; such and such a bill has passed in one of the houses of congress, or failed to pass; the administration has issued this or that statement; the president has approved, or vetoed, a certain bill. but most of the news that comes out of washington is necessarily rather vague, for it depends on the assertions of statesmen who are reluctant to be quoted by name, or even by description. this more than anything else is responsible for the sort of fog, the haze of miasmatic exhalations, which hangs over news with a washington date line. news coming out of washington is apt to represent not what is so but what might be so under certain contingencies, what may turn out to be so, what some eminent personage says is so, or even what he wants the public to believe is so when it is not.”
most subjects on which there is a so-called definite public opinion are much more vague and indefinite, much more complex in their facts and in their ramifications than the news from washington
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which the historian of the new york times describes. consider, for example, what complicated issues are casually disposed of by the average citizen. an uninformed lay public may condemn a new medical theory on slight consideration. its judgment is hit or miss, as medical history proves.
political, economic and moral judgments, as we have seen, are more often expressions of crowd psychology and herd reaction than the result of the calm exercise of judgment. it is difficult to believe that this is not inevitable. public opinion in a society consisting of millions of persons, all of whom must somehow or other reach a working basis with most of the others, is bound to find a level of uniformity founded on the intelligence of the average member of society as a whole or of the particular group to which one may belong. there is a different set of facts on every subject for each man. society cannot wait to find absolute truth. it cannot weigh every issue carefully before making a judgment. the result is that the so-called truths by which society lives are born of compromise among conflicting desires and of interpretation by many minds. they are accepted and intolerantly maintained once they have been determined. in the struggle among ideas, the only test is the one which justice
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holmes of the supreme court pointed out—the power of thought to get itself accepted in the open competition of the market.
the only way for new ideas to gain currency is through the acceptance of them by groups. merely individual advocacy will leave the truth outside the general fund of knowledge and beliefs. the urge toward suppression of minority or dissentient points of view is counteracted in part by the work of the public relations counsel.
the standards of the public relations counsel are his own standards and he will not accept a client whose standards do not come up to them. while he is not called upon to judge the merits of his case any more than a lawyer is called upon to judge his client’s case, nevertheless he must judge the results which his work would accomplish from an ethical point of view.
in law, the judge and jury hold the deciding balance of power. in public opinion, the public relations counsel is judge and jury because through his pleading of a case the public is likely to accede to his opinion and judgment. therefore, the public relations counsel must maintain an intense scrutiny of his actions, avoiding the propagation of unsocial or otherwise harmful movements or ideas.
every public relations counsel has been confronted
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with the necessity of refusing to accept clients whose cases in a law court would be valid, but whose cases in the higher court of public opinion are questionable.
the social value of the public relations counsel lies in the fact that he brings to the public facts and ideas of social utility which would not so readily gain acceptance otherwise. while he, of course, may represent men and individuals who have already gained great acceptance in the public mind, he may represent new ideas of value which have not yet reached their point of largest acceptance or greatest saturation. that in itself renders him important.
as for the relations between the public relations counsel and his client, little can be said which would not be merely a repetition of that code of decency by which men and women make moral judgments and live reputable lives. the public relations counsel owes his client conscientious, effective service, of course. he owes to his client all the duties which the professions assume in relation to those they serve. much more important than any positive duty, however, which 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
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own standards of integrity—to the larger society within which he lives and works.
europe has given us the most recent important study of public opinion and its social and historical effects. it is interesting because it indicates the sweep of the development of an international realization of what a momentous factor in the world’s life public opinion is becoming. i feel that this paragraph from a recent work of professor von ferdinand tonnies is of particular significance to all who would feel that the conscious moulding of public opinion is a task embodying high ideals.
“the future of public opinion,” says professor tonnies, “is the future of civilization. it is certain that the power of public opinion is constantly increasing and will keep on increasing. it is equally certain that it is more and more being influenced, changed, stirred by impulses from below. the danger which this development contains for a progressive ennobling of human society and a progressive heightening of human culture is apparent. the duty of the higher strata of society—the cultivated, the learned, the expert, the intellectual—is therefore clear. they must inject moral and spiritual motives into public opinion. public opinion must become public conscience.”
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it is in the creation of a public conscience that the counsel on public relations is destined, i believe, to fulfill his highest usefulness to the society in which he lives.
