Customer Reviews

Pr!: A Social History of Spin

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

It took to me nearly one month to sit down and write about this book. It has valuable strenghts and some weaknesses.

As a whole, "PR!" makes no easy reading.
It is sold as a "Social History of Spin" and consists of five parts.

Part one tells us about the interest of the author - his attempt to discover the social and historical roots that would explain the boundless role of public relations in our world.
This is the best part of the book, it's fresh, it's written full of enthusiasm, and it feels; Stuart Ewen tells us of his visit with Edward Bernays, one of the most influential pioneers of American public relations.
Ewen describes how he started teaching his course, the "CULT(ure) of Publicity"; how he and his students made the class "look good", "look interesting" in the presence of an unaware journalist, so to meet the reporter's standard of "intriguing".
If you are interested in how spin works, this first part is a must!

Parts two and three really are a social history of spin.
Page after page, Ewen writes a "grim meditation on the human price of industrialization".
Mmmh.
I think this book is very smart. Why? The author brings us examples from the past, and extensively quotes other's sources. Here's an excerpt (as Upton Sinclair summarized it in 1908):
"See, we are just like Rome. Our legislatures are corrupt; our politicians are unprincipled; our rich men are ambitious and unscrupulous. Our newspapers have been purchased and gagged; our colleges have been bribed; our churches have been cowed. Our masses are sinking into degradation and misery; our ruling classes are becoming wanton and cynical".

The big picture is an account of the "business as usual", but, since the examples come from the past and there's no relation with today's firms and people, it's possible to avoid any costly lawsuit.
Eh, eh! Excerpt:
(...) AT&T, in 1903, engaged the services of a recently founded enterprise known as the Publicity Bureau, located in Boston. The Publicity Bureau, a partnership of experienced former newspaper men, was already achieving a reputation for being able to place prepackaged news items in papers around the country, and Frederick P. Fish, president of AT&T, believed that this know-how might be serviceable in the defense of the Bell System's corporate game plan.
James T. Ellsworth, a seasoned journalist with the Bureau, was given the job of steering the AT&T account.
(...) Developing a strategy out of his firsthand experience, Ellsworth took a firts step, which was based on his understanding of newspaper economics. By 1900, advertising - not circulation - was already the prime source of income for most newspapers, and Ellsworth fully comprehended the unspoken power that advertisers could exert over editorial policy and content.
(...) With the lubricant of advertising dollars, Ellsworth was soon providing suddenly compliant editors with a diverse range of packaged articles, already typeset and ready to be placed".

Pity, the extensive use of quotations tends to slow down the reading speed.

Part four looks like an hagiography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I just it think is out of the "Social History of Spin" topic.

Part five is a sum-up of the whole book.

Here is a quotation I appreciate a lot:
"The relationship between publicity and democracy is not essentially corrupt. The free circulation of ideas and debate is critical to the maintenance of an aware public. (...) Publicity becomes and impediment to democracy, however, when the circulation of ideas is governed by enormous concentrations of wealth that have, as their underlying purpose, the perpetuation of their own power. When this is the case - as is too often true today - the ideal of civic participation gives way to a continual sideshow, a masquerade of democracy calculated to pique the public's emotions. In regard to a more democratic future, then, ways of enhancing the circulation of ideas - regardless of economic circumstance - need to be developed.

What is the summing up of this review?
We have here a book worth reading, a smart book that uses history as a tool to understand how spin works right now.
It provides much food for thought - maybe try not to read it when you're tired, but when you are vigilant and with your sense of criticism well aware.""

A teacher colleague and I read this book when it was first published. We would go to the teachers' lunch room almost everday with an ongoing discussion of what we read.

To understand the history, power and influence of public relations and advertising in this country, PR is a must read. In lucid analysis, Ewen lays out how the public relations industry in this country helps to shape the consumer thought of citizens. He shows how this industry grew out of
an elitist view of the masses of people in this country that they did not need to be expose to certain information or processes that converen or controll society--both politically and economically. That instead, their thoughts, ideas, and their access to certain knowledge needed to be controlled and that certain information needed to be manufactured in order to push people to act in a certain way.

He explains, for example, how elitist writers like Walter Lippman "had written that the key to leadership inthe modern age would depend on the ability to manipulate "'symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas. The public mind is mastered, he continued, through an 'intensificatioin of feeling and a degradation of significance.' " In other words, corporations, and their public relations workers essentially use symbols to further their agendas, which is basically to make huge amounts of profit.

I look forward to reading other books by Ewen.

I've recently been investigating the history of public relations for a class I'm teaching. Having surveyed the literature on the subject, this one is head and shoulders the best, more informative and insightful than other books. The historical depth, and range of analysis--linking public relations to broader social realities--are extraordinary.

Beyond being a compelling survey of the history of public relations, I think this book offers a pathway for better understanding a world where--more and more--nothing is as it seems; where there is no reality other than the one assembled by image managers and spin controllers. Clearly written and sobering, this book should provide news junkies around the world with a powerful antidote for the pageantry of staged events.

Public relations (PR) has become so pervasive that its very existence almost goes undetected. Some of it remains on such a level of subtlety that many observers would never notice. Seeing PR requires knowing what to look for. It lurks in obvious places such as advertising and political dialogue. But it can also appear in less obvious places such as photography, movies, television shows and news stories. Once it makes itself known the realization that the modern world is literally covered with PR hits home like a flail to the torso. This realization can dig so deep that one's own identity can even come into question. How much of who we are, what we believe in, and our framework of the world has come from public relations offices? Probably a fair amount. Decoding this miasma of stratified information would encumber a lifetime. Stuart Ewen, the author of this very ambitious history of public relations, struggles with this same question in chapter two. After all, Where is the objective frame of reference for studying something as über alles as PR? Perhaps such a perspective exemplifies philosopher Thomas Nagel's "view from nowhere."

"PR! A Social History of Spin" covers a lot of infrequently covered ground. How many have heard of the now defunct United States Committee of Public Relations (CPI)? Or the philosophy of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)? It's all here. Roughly, the book covers attitudes towards and potential controlling of "the crowd" or "the public" from 1907 to the 1980s. The definition of "public relations" remains elusive throughout, but it takes on various meanings through the delineation of its history over some 400 pages. In the end, "public relations" involves a mosaic of multifarious concepts, attitudes and methodologies. All involve projecting specific ideas of reality to "the public" at large. As this book shows, voluminous creativity has gone into this idea.

The book opens with the author's visit to arguably one of the most influential, and least known publicly, practitioners of public relations: Edward Bernays. Some think he was even more influential than his uncle Sigmund Freud. Bernays applied many of Freud's psychoanalytic ideas to mass persuasion. He created an industry and, arguably, a way of life still in effect today. His endless list of PR accomplishments includes breaking the social taboo against women smoking and providing a framework for public relations. This framework, from the 1947 essay "The Engineering of Consent" includes three main elements: 1. Study the public as "raw materials"; 2. sway the public through emotional, not intellectual, appeals; 3. Create news via stagecraft. These elements, according to the author, still guide PR today.

Bernays' thought represents one major branch of public relations. The book covers both perspectives in depth. On one side sit those who believe that those in power should sway "the masses" with methodologies of persuasion. In other words, they should create a reality to keep the public "in check." Bernays exemplifies this position (perhaps "Bernaysians" would serve as a fitting moniker?). On the other side sit those who think public relations should inform, not persuade the public. The "Progressive Publicists" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries propounded this idea. To such thinkers, information provides the panacea for social ills. An informed public is an empowered public. The swing between these nearly opposing poles pervades the history of public relations, though the book suggests that the followers of Bernays have triumphed. Conceding this, a short concluding chapter asks what implications Bernaysianism carries for modern democracy.

An interesting chapter explores the public relations of the Roosevelt New Deal administration. As frustration towards business practices skyrocketed throughout the 1930s, public relations was used fervently against Wall Street. The New Deal even utilized both branches of public relations to create support for social welfare programs. Using both emotional and intellectual appeals, FDR kept the New Deal alive until a massive business backlash following the war. During the late 1940s and 1950s, business borrowed New Deal tactics for their own ends. Social programs, taxation, and communism fell under the axe of this era's PR. Looking at today's landscape, this approach proved extremely successful. By appropriating New Deal rhetoric of "the greater good," late 20th century business practitioners were able to undermine many of FDR's social programs. As television entered the public sphere, the public relations industry saw a golden opportunity. And they took it. As early as 1955 a book entitled "Telephone News on Television" provided guidance for mass persuasion via television.

The book's bulk deals mainly with post-war public relations. Not until the book's fifth and final part does television enter the discussion. The post 1950s era gets largely sequestered to chapters 15 and 16. Those looking for contemporary perspectives on PR will only find nibbles here. Though the book nonetheless remains incredibly relevant today. Also, its publication date of 1996 pretty much precludes any discussion of the now most pervasive PR tool: the internet. And though the author's political stance stands out like neon, the book provides a fascinating, potentially life-altering, perspective on modern media and modern life. The thick pages of "PR! A social history of spin" carry massive implications for anyone living in a modern democracy. People from any political persuasion will benefit.

This is a must read to understand public relations at its highest form and necessary to prepare for implementation of disruptive technology, or the marketing of any product. It highlights the procedures and the effectiveness of the procedures. It gives many thoughts to contemplate at a commercial and social level.

Recently there has been a lot of news about AT&T's campaign to establish global domination over the internet. In this book, we learn that AT&Ts attempt to gain a monopoly over all forms of communication is a century old. From 1904, Ewen relates, AT&T was already packaging its plan to gain control of all forms of wire communication in the disguise of kindly old "Ma Bell." The section on AT&T, along with the rest of the book, is must reading.

OH, YES! YOUR OWNERS (THE INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL ELITE) DO NOT WANT YOU TO READ THIS BOOK!!!!!!!!! Look, the average person is a moron. They believe everything they read and do not think. The human cattle do not think, and this is why the worthless sheeple need and beg for their owners to OWN them. It is righteous and moral that the sheeple be traded like commodities on the stock market, because they LOVE living in the "Propaganda Matrix" invented by Dr. Edward Bernays. I love this book by Stuart Ewen, and I have read it MANY times. BUY IT NOW! Also, check out my website: [...]

After hearing Stuart Ewen's amazing speech in Chicago in early June (he was keynote speaker, along with Oprah Winfrey, at the 1997 Promax/BDA convention) I rushed out and bought his book. I had a feeling I needed to read it. I was right. The book blew my mind. The role of propaganda in our everyday lives, the widespread strategies of mental and visual engineering, were laid bare with remarkable clarity. This book should be required reading for anyone living within shouting distance of American commercial culture...That means everyone

A disturbing history. Before now, untold. This book has opened my eyes to the news behind the news, the ways that the systematic orchestration of public consciousness undermines the possibility of democracy in America today. All who still hold to the idea of Americans as a free people must read this book