Background of Public Relations

Growth and Development of Public Relations

The use of public relation seems to be older than that of its origin as a term. When Queen Elizabeth-I came to the power in 1558, the internal situation of the UK was in disarray in which the possibility of rebellion always endangered the stability of the government. But Elizabeth was not only able to manage the affair by bringing stability and order in the society, but also raised the nation to an acclaimed height. One of the secrets of her miraculous success was unquestioningly good public relations she employed by appointing able administrators who rendered a good deal of dedicated service to the nation.  

Public relations is considered an important tool in moulding public opinion which constitutes the basic spirit of democracy. The term public opinion was not used until the eighteenth century. The Greek writers elaborated on public will, which was ultimately shaped by the Romans in the expression of Vox Populli (popularly known as Vox Pops). The need of influencing voice of the people on predetermined line paved the ground for the emergence of public relations. Information is the core of communication which is partly designed to influence the action and opinion of the public. When information is disseminated with the purpose, it is communication.

American President Thomas Jefferson first coined the term public relations in his address to the Congress in 1807. The intention of the President was to explore meaningful words for expressing his idea. Public Relations as an organized profession emerged in the United States. According to Scott Phillip the birth of public relations was closely associated with the beginning of American industrialization. In 1900 Publicity Bureau, a public relations consultancy firm, was established in Boston. In 1915, Ivy Lee engineered public campaign on behalf of Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Lee was perhaps the most famous of the early public relations practitioners. He helped to develop many of the techniques and principles that today’s practitioners follow. He believed in open communications with the media, and he was candid and frank in his approach to the press. He understood that good corporate performance was the basis of good publicity. Many believe that his major contribution was to humanize wealthy businessmen and to cast big business in a more positive light.

A former Wall Street reporter, Ivy Lee became a public relations counselor with George Parker in 1904. He developed a publicity policy of “the public be informed” in contrast to the infamous statement of financier William Vanderbilt, “the public be damned.”

‘Business had to tell its story honestly, accurately, and openly in order to win public understanding and support’.. .. Lee

During the First World War, the then US president, Woodrow Wilson created a committee on Public Information headed by George Creel. It had many young faces, who acted as propagandists. The objective of the committee was to unite the public opinion in favour of the war. During those times PR was the form of publicity & its objective was to influence the masses and it was synonymous with ‘influencing’. There was a quiet period between WW-I & WW-II. When the PR exercises had been stopped during the WW-II, the need of the PR was felt again. This time the emphasis was on the two way communication and relationships.

PR in India

In India the use of public relation dates back to the time of Ashok, the Maruya Emperor who made arrangements for inscribing his message on different parts of his empire. The edicts were to inform the people about the different aspects of his policy. He urged the people to perform certain tasks which were mainly designed to establish general welfare on religious lines. Another aspect of the inscriptions was to seek goodwill from the people in order to strengthen the order of establishment. The language of the script was not same in different regions. The objective of using different scripts in providing the same information was to widen the scope of understanding in the context of specific needs of people living in different parts of empire. Emperor Ashok realized that the better understanding of the script would pave the ground for winning the people’s confidence which might be described as an exercise of public relations.

The public relation information is considered to be the staple food that is being dished out to the target audience or to the external public with a definite purpose. Hence, public relations may be described as a communication that is designed to influence the behaviour of the people. Kabir, Srimanta Sankardev, Srimanta Madhavdev, Chaitnya Mahaprabhu, and other great religious saints try to diffuse knowledge through the traditional or folk media of communication in order to bring revolutionary changes in human consciousness. In the twentieth century Mao-Tse-Tung and Mahatma Gandhi gave birth to the concept of mass communication which demanded.
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