The publication of this article brought such a number of requests from the friends of Miss S. to see her collection, that the ingenious press agent was obliged to invent and publish another fabrication—this time of a midnight robbery in which the collection disappeared. This shameless story was told me by the press agent himself, and he gave me from his scrap-book the fake clipping I have just read.
Similarly the imitation riots, and protests from delegations of negroes, where Thomas Dixon's Ku-Klux play, "The Clansman," was to be produced, were often due to the initiative of the enterprising press agent—at least so he told me.
I would not have you think, however, that the press bureau is not in many instances a perfectly legitimate institution, and cannot be used with all propriety by religious, reform, political, and other organizations. The woman's suffrage movement, for instance, has a well-equipped and organized bureau; while the two great political parties during campaign times have sent out for many years news-articles and editorials of great value to the country and partisan press.
Perhaps the most efficacious press bureau of the legitimate kind is that of the Christian Scientists. Every time an editor prints anything derogatory to the Rev. Mary Baker G. Eddy, or her influential cult, a suave and professionally happy gentleman immediately sends his card into the sanctum, and, holding the offensive clipping in one hand, together with a brief and well-written reply, says with the utmost courtesy:—
"Inasmuch, my good sir, as you deemed it worth while to devote so much of your valuable space to spreading broadcast before your intelligent audience an error about Christian Science, I feel sure that your sense of justice will make plain to you the privilege of giving us space to demonstrate the real truth of the matter."
To the editor with a conscience—and some of us still have the vestiges of one—this is a hard argument to evade; and as a result Christian Science gets twice as much notice in the papers as it would were there no smiling press agent to follow up every unfavorable reference, no matter how obscure the publication. The next time the editor wants to point a jest at the expense of Christian Science, he thinks twice and then substitutes some other cause that does not employ an editorial rectifier.
But perhaps the best use of a publicity bureau was made recently by the street-railway company of Roanoke, Virginia, and the water company of Scranton, Pennsylvania. Both of these companies had become very unpopular, one as a result of poor street-car service, and the other on account of a typhoid epidemic supposed to have been started from the pollution of the company's reservoir. Both companies appropriated a good sum of money, hired a press agent, and bought advertising space in the local papers every day for a month or more. These advertisements gave the companies' side of the case with such candor and convincing fairness that they soon became the talk of the town, personal letters were written to the papers about them, and the hostility toward them very quickly turned to a feeling of good-will. It pays to take the public into your confidence.
And now the staid "Rail-Road Age-Gazette" has sounded the call for a great press agent to arise and stem the growing public hostility to the railroads. The "Age-Gazette" did not use the phrase "press agent," as the appellation has not as yet come into its full dignity. It employed the more euphonious term "Railroad Diplomatist." Still, high-sounding titles have their use, as when some of my brother editors call their "reporters" "Special Commissioners," and their foreign correspondents "Journalistic Ambassadors."
We had a Peace and Arbitration Congress in New York two years ago. Being chairman of the Press Committee, I employed a firm of press agents to get for us the maximum amount of publicity. As a result we received over ten thousand clippings from the papers of the United States alone. I do not mean to claim that the Congress would not have been extensively noticed without the deft work of the agents; but they unquestionably helped a great deal. The newspapers welcome them when they represent such well-known philanthropic institutions as the Peace Society, the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the People's Institute, because the copy they "turn in" requires little or no further editing before it is sent to the printer. But when they are employed to promote financial ventures, wars on labor unions, anti-municipal ownership campaigns, or other private and class interests, then the editors discount what they provide and they actually do more harm than good to the cause they are intended to promote.
Press agents, however, are sometimes enabled to get illegitimate matter into our best papers. I recall to your memory the reports favorable to the companies sent out during the great insurance investigations in New York. "Collier's" has told the whole story.[2 ] One of the agents employed testified on the witness-stand that a great insurance company agreed to pay a dollar a line for what he could get into the papers. He made his own arrangements with the journals that took his stuff, and the difference between the price he had to pay and the dollar a line he got from the insurance company was to be his private rake-off. He succeeded in securing the publication of six dispatches of about two hundred and fifty words, in such well-known newspapers as the St. Paul "Pioneer Press," the Boston "Herald," the Toledo "Blade," the Buffalo "Courier," the Florida "Times-Union," the Atlanta "Constitution," and the Wilmington "News." It is only fair to state, however, that there was nothing in the evidence to show whether the papers went into the arrangement on a business basis, or were fooled into thinking the dispatches they published were genuine reports of the proceedings before the committee.