X is a good corporate citizen”;
enter it into the day’s media discourse by sending press releases, setting up a press
conference, or otherwise attracting the news media’s attention; borrow from the media’s
credibility and access by having that private message reported as if it were news; and
conclude by making that formerly private message a matter of public consciousness. A
good news story is worth far more to a company or interest group than an ad, since the
news has far greater trust value and reach. There are many forms of public relations, including government lobbying, financial PR, and
crisis communications. Some have specialized publics, such as politicians or medical
doctors, while others address the wider world. But the fundamental function of PR is to
make someone’s private message a matter of public awareness and concern. In doing this,
public relations works by impersonating public discourse–a kind of “stealth” communication
in which an audience believes that the news story, the event, or the personality is true, real
or objective.
2. AC640 reading: Stuart Ewen, “Unseen Engineers: Biography of an Idea.”
Stuart Ewen is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at
Hunter College, a campus affiliated with the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the
author of a number of books on advertising, style, and consumer culture, including Captains
of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social 英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】Roots of Consumer Culture and All-
Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture.
a. crowd theory: the philosophical precursor to PR
th th
In the late 19
and early 20 centuries, there emerged a body of research into the behaviour
of crowds that is often called “crowd theory”. The major crowd theorists were Gustav Le
Bon, author of the 1895 book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind; Gabriel Tarde,
author of the 1903 book The Laws of Imitation; and Wilfred Trotter, author of The Instincts of
the Herd in Peace and War.
The underlying sentiment in this research was often anti-democratic in spirit, as conservative
intellectuals began to worry about the practicality of allowing ordinary people power (through
the vote, or by access to mass media) in a society thought too complex for them to
understand. At this time, the American population was growing rapidly, and was especially
swelled by new waves of immigration from Europe involving people (Italians, Irish, eastern
Europeans) who seemed exotic and dangerous to the British-descended American ruling
class. Crowd theory was designed to help understand and manage this new “mass society,”
using the new science of social psychology and adapting some of the early works of Freud
to the work of understanding the mass society. Crowd theory worked with a peculiar understanding of history. Throughout history, the
irrationality of the average person had been contained by the
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