An honest public relations practitioner, Edward Bernays reasoned, could use all the wiles of the profession to measure public opinion and try to sway it, to see how people perceived politicians and repackage them more to the public's liking - provided it was all done to 'lead the people to where they want to go.' - Excerpt from "The Father of Spin" by Larry Tye
Larry Tye may have hit the nail on the head in summing up the life and times of one PR's most famed figures - Edward Bernays - but he hasn't exactly iconized the profession. His new book, "The Father of Spin," (Crown, $27.50) isn't likely to sit well with PR professionals if readers conclude that PR, a la the Bernays way, is how the industry functions in the present.
Interestingly enough, "The Father of Spin" is a kind of literary face-off between the media and PR, and a reminder of the chasm that still exists between the profession and its external audiences. PR executives have done a fine job of promoting the industry in inner circles. Yet observers, like the press, don't always get PR - probably because they come up against neophytes, not counselors, far too often.
Bernays was closer to the latter, but (hopefully) the antithesis of what makes a good PR counselor today.
Tye took a one-year leave from the Boston Globe to chronicle Bernays's life. Thus far, he's received mixed reviews, but that isn't likely to be the lasting impression of this biography of Bernays. We believe its true impact will be the debate and analysis it breeds about an industry that still wants to divorce itself from the "spin" label and the old-school execution of PR as publicity mongering.
The "Father of PR" died in 1995 at age 103, his career having evolved from the flashy style of PR he practiced in the 1920s, to the academic advocacy he later preached.
Conceptually, what Bernays did (he's credited with pulling off stunts like targeting women as Lucky Strike smokers by playing the feminist card) certainly presents how powerful messages can be in influencing public perception/behavior, but his tactics were less than kosher.
The State of PR Today
"To infer that public relations today resembles the press pageantry practiced in the early part of this century is ludicrous," PRSA Director of PR Richard George wrote in a yet-to-be-published op-ed piece forwarded to us. "As his career advanced, Bernays himself preached the need for public relations to be a management level discipline and not simply media relations."
Dennis McGrath with McGrath-Buckley Consulting Group, Minneapolis, agrees.
"The problem is linking him to our field today - the whole spin, bounce thing. What he did was propaganda. That is not what we do today, and we work with our clients on much more than media relations," he adds.
The impact of Tye's prose sets out the wide divide between how PR has been perceived and what it's supposed to be in the style preached by counselors who say that what they do is help companies "do the right thing."
The Take on Tye
Although the author aptly pierces the persona that is Bernays, he also flogs the industry's reputation. The book was an undertaking that was more than a passion du jour, says Tye of the 290-page-plus book.
"As a reporter [at the Boston Globe], I became intrigued by the profession. But that interest grew when I was on fellowship four years ago at Harvard. I took a creative writing course Bernays's daughter Anne Bernays taught and spoke with her husband, Justin Kaplan, who is a Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer (Mark Twain)."
Tye also says he was familiar with Bernays because of the many letters to the editors he'd write to the Globe, sometimes to espouse his views on a cause (such as tearing down sycamore trees along the river) and correcting what he believed were historical inaccuracies.
And understanding history is a significant chunk of the lessons Tye offers.
"I've always been quite negative about the fact that this guy's (who's held up as a guru in our profession) chief claim to fame was encouraging women to smoke. I was never happy with that association," McGrath muses. "But as I was leafing through this book, I took a more balanced view of him: Bernays was, after all, a product of his time. And our nation seems to be in a revisiting mode, looking back to everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln, to examine public figures' foibles."
McGrath's view is likely to be one of the resounding messages that remains after the industry gets its fill of Tye's verbiage. And having turned the final page, our perspective on this industry includes even more of an acknowledgment of its power and a reminder that PR, best practiced, concedes the past to this industry granddaddy, but not the now.