The electoral success of political operators such as Donald Trump and Italy ’ s Five Star Movement are striking examples suggesting that post-truth PR has enabled a promotional process that has simultaneously charged public life with a combination of artificiality and grandiosity . In the contest for attention in the modern public sphere , some populist politicians and other public figures deliberately breach the norms of civic discourse , adopting an excessively aggressive and strident tone in their public communication . This example from politics is one component of how the post-classical style of PR has developed in response to conditions in society in the disinformation era .
While the arrival of a post-truth style of PR is a response to the emergence of new conditions in society and the media , it is also a natural progression from the way the father of PR - Edward Bernays - used stunts in the 1920s and 1930s . The pseudoevents created by PR people in order to gain audience attention also permeated the media from the 1960s onwards . Alongside earnestly promoting the benefits of Corporate Social Responsibility ( CSR ) to corporates and public alike throughout the 1980s and 1990s , PR people were party to the industrial-scale manufacture of entirely synthetic news events that were created with the sole purpose of generating media interest and news coverage . These pseudoevents became prevalent in PR work and media consumption , perhaps especially so in the fields of celebrity and politics .
Regardless of the sector , the mode of operation is constant . Media confections are designed and distributed by PR people , which match the needs of mass media but are light on facts , focusing instead on general intentions and feelings . In the distribution phase , when these narratives and visual materials are passed on to journalists , the media is largely compliant - or at least turns a blind eye - while gratefully accepting the ready-made content that has been presented to them . Similar complaints about a rhetorical resource imbalance in PR equations - alongside concerns about its relationship with the truth - were made by Plato and other critics of the early relationship intermediary work of the Sophists .
In the current context of dislocation in economics , politics , society and technology , PR is again adapting and finding a place for its communicative labor . PR people ’ s role
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The increased scale of deception and a disregard for the truth in some modern public communication is an indicator of a more aggressive type of PR , which is less concerned with persuasion and contributing information in order to build consensus in the public sphere and more focused on winning at all costs .
as providers of information to the public domain only endures over time if it is built upon high levels of trust and reliability with the media that use that material .
In the case of mass media such as broadcast TV news , attempts to introduce falsehoods are normally swiftly identified and the source discredited . The knowledge produced by PR people in their role as informational intermediaries is intended to inform or to persuade , and is almost always part of broader plan to generate and distribute a message that will engage an audience and achieve a desired effect . The balance between the informational and persuasion priorities of PR is important to ethical and sustainable practice of PR , as well as justifying a social value as part of a process that introduces information to debates in the public sphere .
The appearance of fake news in PR and campaigning is a result of a focus on persuasion only with little regard to the veracity of its information component , in a win at all costs style of aggressive campaigning . Yet the contribution of PR to the making of truth and introducing new facts to debate through press releases , research reports and other content , places the work of PR workers in the philosophical realm of “ veritism ,” which denotes the way truth is attached to the people who produce and distribute knowledge ( Fuller , 1988 ).
Anti-Vaxxers : Fighting The Facts
The metaphor of disease and disinformation is an apt one as 2018 and 2019 saw hundreds of outbreaks of infectious diseases in developed countries , with the United States alone experiencing its worst outbreaks of measles since 1994 . The World Health
Organization ( WHO ) has identified what it calls vaccine hesitancy among parents of small children in developed countries as one of the top ten threats to global health in 2019 . Opposition to vaccines has resulted from years of campaigning by the so called “ anti-vaxxers ”, who have positioned themselves as victimized tellers of truth , struggling heroically against an alleged conspiracy of governments , the medical profession and big pharmaceutical companies ( or big pharma ).
The campaign gained fresh momentum in the last five years or so , through association with various populist political campaigns , but had been festering since the 1998 publication of a paper in The Lancet Medical Journal by , Dr . Andrew Wakefield , in which he claimed to have established a link between autism and administration of the combination measles , mumps and rubella ( MMR ) vaccine . The campaign has used the full mix of PR tools , including a documentary film produced in 2016 dubbed : “ Vaxxed : From Cover-Up to Catastrophe ” as well as multiple conferences , rallies and celebrity endorsement from model Elle Macpherson and Donald Trump . The antivax movement has been labelled as the emblematic conspiracy theory of our times and is generating a giant threat to global health .
The survival and prominence of the anti-vax movement is also emblematic for the way its epistemological foundations rest upon a fraudulent report that was denounced by 10 co-authors and by the editor of The Lancet as utterly false . This long-running campaign of plain disinformation was quite simply based on the untruths of fraudulent research by Dr . Wakefield , who was struck off as a doctor in the United Kingdom after being found guilty at a professional hearing over 30 different charges , including dishonesty .
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