英语论文网

cal need do cigarettes serve? An economy built on endless growth requires an ongoing dialogue with human desire, converting our fantasies, whims, and vanities into motives for consumption. As Galbraith wrote in The Affluent Society (1958), manufacturers don’t merely produce goods, but using advertising must provoke a craving for these goods even when there is no practical need for them. “The fact that wants can be synthesized by advertising, catalyzed by salesmanship, and shaped by the discreet manipulation of the persuaders,” the Harvard intellectual and advisor to John F. Kennedy argued, “shows that they are not very urgent.” (1958: 8) A photo and bibliography of Galbraith are in the Rogue’s Gallery. The ironic effect of advertising is that it typically promises far more than the product can deliver. The pursuit of such false promises leads to social, environmental, and economic damage of the kind with which North Americans—obese, indebted, and with our homes overfilled with goods--are only too familiar. In Martin’s view, such illusory appeals as made by advertisers tamper with humanity’s inherent capacity for truth, offering us misleading and ultimately harmful messages that argue that happiness lies in material consumption. “It is better to be a dissatisfied human,” Martin quotes Socrates, “than a satisfied pig.” b. public relations Public relations originated as a response to the growth of large corporations, and the need of such corporations—Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, Andrew Carnegie’s Carnegie Steel Corporation, or the J.P. Morgan bank—to do “damage control” in the late nineteenth century when public opinion began to turn against the large corporate “trusts.” In the twentieth century, the greater centrality of media in the culture required corporations to find ways to manage their relationship with journalists. Ethical complexity was, and is, at the centre of public relations as a communication enterprise. This complexity develops at the point that the private interests of those who hire PR firms negotiate with the public good. Martin writes (186): “At the core of the whole public relations endeavour is the problem of ethics. It arises the moment we contemplate the possibility that the best interests of a particular institution, public or private, commercial or non-commercial, may not coincide with the best of the public generally.” Public relations is the product of such an imperfect world—one of clashing interests, moral ambiguity, and strategic half-truths. Born of elite concerns to manage democracy on behalf of the powerful, and yet a valuable tool available to charities and non-profits as they seek to get their socially positive messages heard in a noisy media culture, PR remains one of the most ethically conflicted areas of professional communication. c. Ivy Lee and the ethics of PR "This is not a secret press bureau. All our work is done in the open. We aim to supply news.” From Ivy Lee’s “Declaration of Principles,” 1906 Martin then uses the life and career of one of the founders of PR, Ivy Lee, to discuss PR ethics. Where Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays might be taken as the intellectual founders of PR, Lee was its earliest major practitioner. The purpose of PR in Lee’s view was to “create or encourage a favourable image of a company in the public mind.” Lee personified the ethical complexity of P