Crystallizing Public Opinion

by Edward L. Bernays

Now sensitiveness to the state of mind of the public is a difficult thing to achieve or maintain. Any man can tell you with more or less accuracy and clearness his own reactions on any particular issue. But few men have the time or the interest or the training to develop a sense of what other persons think or feel about the same issue. In his own profession the skilled practitioner is sensitive and understanding. The lawyer can tell what argument will appeal to court or jury. The salesman can tell what points to stress to his prospective buyers. The politician can tell what to emphasize to his audience, but the ability to estimate group reactions on a large scale over a wide geographic and psychological area is a specialized ability which must be developed with the same painstaking self-criticism and with the same dependence on experience that are required for the development of the clinical sense in the doctor or surgeon.

Of course, the public relations counsel employs all those practical means of gauging the public mind which modern advertising has developed and uses. He employs the research campaign, the symposium, the survey of a particular group or of a particular state of mind as a further aid, and confirmation or modification of his own appraisals and judgments.

Charles J. Rosebault, the author of an article in the New York Times recently, headed “Men Who Wield the Spotlight,” remarks that the competent public relations counsel has generally had some newspaper training and that the value of this training “is a keen sense of the likes and dislikes of what we call the public—that is, the average of men and women. The needle of the compass is no more sensitive to direction, nor the mercury in the thermometer to variations of heat and cold than is this expert to the influence of publicity upon the mind and emotions of the man in the street.”

It is not surprising that the growing interest of the public in men and movements should have led to the spontaneous creation of the new profession.

We have presented here, in very broad outline, a picture of the fundamental work of the public relations counsel and of the fundamental conditions which have produced him. On the one hand, a complex environment of which only small, disconnected portions are available to different persons; on the other hand, the great and increasing importance either of making one’s case accessible to the public mind or of determining whether that case will impinge favorably or unfavorably upon the public mind—these two conditions, taken together, have resulted inevitably in the public relations counsel. Mr. Lippmann finds in these facts the underlying reason for the existence of what he calls the “press agent.” “The enormous discretion,” he says, “as to what facts and what impressions shall be reported is steadily convincing every organized group of people that, whether it wishes to secure publicity or to avoid it, the exercise of discretion cannot be left to the reporter. It is safer to hire a press agent who stands between the group and the newspapers.”[3]

It is clear that the popular impression of the scope and functions of the counsel on public relations must be radically revised if any accurate picture of the profession is to be looked for. The public relations counsel is the lineal descendant, to be sure, of the circus advance-man and of the semi-journalist promoter of small-part actresses. The economic conditions which have produced him, however, and made his profession the important one it is to-day, have in themselves materially changed the character of his work.

His primary function now is not to bring his clients by chance to the public’s attention, nor to extricate them from difficulties into which they have already drifted, but to advise his clients how positive results can be accomplished in the field of public relations and to keep them from drifting inadvertently into unfortunate or harmful situations. The public relations counsel will find that the conditions under which his client operates, be it a government, a manufacturer of food products or a railroad system, are constantly changing and that he must advise modifications in policy in accordance with such changes in the public point of view. As such, the public relations counsel must be alive to the events of the day—not only the events that are printed but the events which are forming hour by hour, as reported in the words that are spoken on the street, in the smoking cars, in the school room, or expressed in any of the other forms of thought communication that make up public opinion.

So long as the press remains the greatest single medium for reaching the public mind, the work of the public relations counsel will necessarily have close contacts with the work of the journalist. He transmits his ideas, however, through all those mediums which help to build public opinion—the radio, the lecture platform, advertising, the stage, the motion picture, the mails. On the other hand, he is becoming to-day as much of an adviser on actions as he is the communicator of these actions to the public.

The public relations consultant is ideally a constructive force in the community. The results of his work are often accelerated interest in matters of value and importance to the social, economic or political life of the community.

The public relations counsel is the pleader to the public of a point of view. He acts in this capacity as a consultant both in interpreting the public to his client and in helping to interpret his client to the public. He helps to mould the action of his client as well as to mould public opinion.