Abuse and self‐abuse – PR and its USP, plausible deniability

Abstract

Who started it we will never know. But from the birth of newspapers, advertisers realised that the third party endorsement of apparently independent editorial reporting delivered their message more cheaply – and arguably more credibly – than paid advertising. Thus in the 17th century the publicist was born to service “the fellow who cannot lye sufficiently himself [who] gets one of these to do’t for him”. Any history of public relations is a running commentary on the techniques used to deliver third party endorsement as the media has evolved: from Ivy Lee’s simple packaging of information approach, through Bernays’ “engineering consent”, to today’s use of bloggers on the web or the more sophisticated “journo lobbying”, it is a record of how practitioners deliver public relations’ unique selling proposition, the plausible deniability which is third party endorsement.

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