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Public Relation Publicity, Propaganda and Public Opinion As one embarks on the academic route to understand these three terms, he will inevitably ascertain that PR publicity, Propaganda and Public relation are essentially related to the most common and fundamental facet of our every day life – COMMUNICATION. How are Public Relation publicity, Propaganda and Public relation related to communication? Communication, as a word sounds very familiar, and as a general idea is very significant. We all know how to communicate and we all communicate with each other; that’s why we have friends, family and a circle of other people we communicate on a daily basis. What is communication? Communication in its most simple form could be understood as a process of transferring information from one entity to another. While Macmillan dictionary defines it as the process of giving information or of making emotions or ideas known to someone, according to the Oxford Dictionary, it is the imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium. There could be different ways of communicating; verbal and non-verbal, and also that there is a flow of information from one entity to another. Purposes of communication: There must be a purpose of a communication, as only purpose could attribute a meaning to a data so as to make it information. As the above-mentioned diagram displays, there can be several purposes of communication. They can be: an action Stages of communication: A communication witnesses various stages before it achieves the intended purpose. information is transferred and it becomes a knowledge for the target audience. -way exchange of ideas to give develop an understanding by effectively listening to the target audience and satisfying their queries. involvement and engagement so that the two parties develop a communication relation. is a change in action or behavioral pattern. This process makes it amply clear that the ultimate stage of a communication would be a result where a change in action or opinion is brought about and the goal is achieved. What is Public Relation? ‘PR’ stands for public relations. Institute of Public Relations, USA defines PR as the deliberate, planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain mutual understanding between on organization and its publics. Herbert M. Baus, the political campaign manager who engineered President Richard M. Nixon's victory in California in 1960 and remained a major supporter and campaigner for Nixon in US Senate, vice presidential and presidential races, defined PR as a combination of philosophy, sociology, economics, language, psychology, journalism, communication and other knowledges into a system of human understanding. PR aims at transmitting a message to its target audience. It seeks to establish a connect with a certain group of people or organisation in order to achieve an objective. It can have a wide circle of entities that it aims to reach to. A few of these are mentioned in the image. What is Publicity? Publicity, in stricter sense, means a conscious and calculated attempt to manage the public's perception of a subject. Subject in the context of the definition could include people, for example, a politician or an artist as well as particular goods and services, organizations of all kinds, and works of art or entertainment. Liberally interpreted, publicity would tend to draw attention of people or entities towards a particular subject. It usually seeks to create a positive opinion and to gain public awareness for a product, person, service, cause or organization. Are Public Relation and publicity synonymous or completely exclusive? PR (Public Relation) and publicity are not synonymous but can be said to be two aspects of communication. Their boundaries overlap because of the goals they seek to achieve but they differ in the technique of their approach. Public relation usually deals with individual publicity with the people in a mass while dissemination of information to the people in the mass is distinct from individual publicity. Many public relations campaigns include provisions for publicity and publicity can be seen as a result of effective public relations planning. Therefore, we can say that PR generates publicity but that is not all to the purpose of PR. It has a broader perspective and it involves many tactics for the purpose of managing image and reputation. Tools of PR (Public Relation): While press releases and notes constituted the primitive tool of PR, with advancement in technology and shrinking of the world with increased use of computers, various innovative modes of public relation have emerged. Professionals are now using technology as their main tool to get their messages to target audiences and it goes beyond publicity. With the creation of social networks, blogs, and even Internet radio, PR professionals are able to send direct messages through these mediums that attract the target audiences. Methods used to find out what is appealing to target audiences include the use of surveys, conducting research or even focus groups. Tactics are the ways to attract target audiences by using the information gathered about that audience and directing a message to them using tools such as social mediums or other technology. What is Propaganda? According to Clyde R Miller propaganda is the attempt to influence others to some predetermined end by appealing to their thought and feeling. As per Anderson and Parker, propaganda is the deliberate use of communication to induce people to favour one predetermined line of thought or action over another. Kimball Young defined propaganda as the more or less deliberate planned and systematic use of symbol chiefly through suggestion and related psychological techniques with a view first to altering and controlling opinions, ideas and values and ultimately to changing overt action along predetermined lines. In simplest terms, propaganda is the use of reasoning or facts in order to persuade another person to favour a particular kind of action that he would otherwise not favour or has not been in favour of. Propaganda has to be continuous and needs to have impact not only on the people who do not support the propagated idea, but also has to consolidate those who already support the idea, but have doubts, and eliminate these doubts. Propaganda is not always negative: Let us not gather the notion that propaganda is necessarily the propagation of wrong views by questionable methods. Although, it uses strong persuasive tools to change one’s opinion in the favour of a particular subject, groups and organizations whose objectives have been socially constructive have often resorted to the method of propaganda. The Family Planning Department, in order to control the birth rate has used all the devices of propaganda. Propaganda is merely a means of influencing others often towards a desirable end. It aims at persuasion by means of symbols. Features of propaganda: A common feature about most of the propaganda strategies are that they seldom show the situation from different points of view and refrains from giving the full picture in details. A propagandist is generally expected to be aimed at changing people’s opinion, belief and understanding the situation in order to influence their future actions and decisions so that these actions would coincide with the interests of the propagated group, or person. And hence, propaganda, an influential communication strategy, is always the most effective when it rests upon verifiable information. It can readily justify itself in terms of the real interests of the target groups and can show a genuine commonality or interests among the individuals who compose the group. Besides, there are certain common features of propaganda. As the main idea of propaganda is to actively influence people’s opinion and social mood, it uses various means of spreading ideas. The first feature of propaganda is therefore the tendency to utilize as many means of spreading information as possible: telecommunications, radio, banners, internet means, different billboards, leaflets and advertisements, and even road signs containing special information can be used as the sources of influencing public opinion. Secondly, propaganda is meant to influence people’s emotions first of all, for the messages that involve emotional side will be remembered first. Usually the propagated messages are meant to underline, romanticize some idea or phenomenon, or vise versa, are directed to show some idea or person from the negative side. In any case strong emotional involvedness of the audience is used in propagating to replace missing facts with the people’s attitude to the propagated phenomenon. Uses of propaganda: Even without knowing this, we all have to deal with propaganda in our ordinary life. It happens through advertising, propaganda occurs in political speeches, in TV shows, even in the news. With the development of means of communication and especially of mass media, propaganda has become inseparable from the contemporary mass culture. In modern times it has come to play an important role. The modern world is very much dependent on it owing to its pace of influencing opinion. The government, business houses, political parties and various other sections of society use it so serve their own distinctive purposes. While the techniques of propaganda can be successfully implemented to trigger damaging emotions, like the one policy, ‘Divide and Rule,’ helped the British government to rule on India as an imperial colony for two centuries, propaganda can equally be used for positive purposes like for spreading healthy lifestyle, anti-smoking campaigns, anti-discrimination ideas etc. In the two world wars the battle on the propaganda front was as intense as on the military front. While the German government led by Hitler extensively relied on propaganda to spread the notion that the war was necessary and that Germans were superior that Americans or Britishers, American government used a wide variety of media and the propaganda fomented hatred for the enemy and support for allies, urged great efforts for production and victory gardens, enjoined people to make do so that more material could go to the war effort, and sold war bonds. Propaganda helped in crushing the morale of the army and civil population in the enemy state and in building up the morale of the army and civil population in one’s own state. The above picture, showing Hitler as a knight holding the national flag, is one of the large number of posters used by the German during the world war to promote his personality. Similarly, on a positive note, propaganda can also be useful to bring about a change in the policy of the government. In India the propaganda against dowry, pre-natal sex determination and gender discrimination helped the government of India to enact laws prohibiting the impugned acts. The propaganda against compulsory sterilization forced the government to change not only its policy regarding family planning programme but also the name of the Ministry from the Ministry of Family Planning to Ministry for Family Welfare. The next image shows one of the propaganda pictures used by the family welfare department to discourage people from differentiating between a male child and a girl child. The Government, employing propaganda as a powerful instrument to bring about social change, also uses propaganda to win people’s cooperation for implementing its policies and programmes. Thus the family planning programme was widely publicised and vast propaganda machinery was mobilised to influence the people in its favour. It is difficult to change the habits and attitudes of the people. The propagandist through psychological aids goes directly to the springs of motivation. Propaganda is an important medium for transmitting those pressures which help in breaking the bonds of the traditional social order. The next image is the one that propagated the idea of having a small family. This image used to be displayed in cinema halls before start of a movie, on TV and used to pasted as posters at several points letting people know the benefits of a small family. Difference between PR publicity and propaganda: While propaganda is a deliberate and guided campaign to induce people for the acceptance of a given idea using persuasive techniques, publicity looks at disseminating information, maintaining public image of a subject and is constantly promoted. While PR publicity and propaganda, as tools of communication, have different features and objectives, if one looks closely, both aim at influencing ‘public opinion’. What is meant by public opinion? According to Bertrand R Canadian, “Public opinion is an expression of a belief held in common by members of a group or public on a controversial issue. The public opinion emanates from an individual’s opinion of members of a group whose views are subjected to the influences exerted by the group until a consensus is reached and is expressed as the public opinion. Public opinion can also be comprehended as the aggregate of individual attitudes or beliefs held by the adult population. The basic objective of PR publicity and propaganda is to influence public opinion, which develops from the attitudes of individual comprising the public. Therefore, it is important to understand the meaning of attitudes, why people hold attitudes and their role in the opinion for mind process. How is attitude important in forming opinion? Attitude may be defined as a way of looking at situations. An attitude expressed verbally by behavior is an opinion. Attitude which expresses a feeling for or dislikes are a product of numerous physical and mental influence. Body process affects attitudes. Good health contributes to favorable attitudes, while illness develops negative attitudes. Cultural and religious backgrounds often determine a person's attitude. Attitudes are dominant until aroused by motive, which are incited by a need, emotion, idea or physical state. The motives which arouse attitudes in individuals originate into desires for rewards, as in the case of a worker who has a favorable attitude towards his union because it seeks to secure for him increased compensation and benefits. Businessman agreement seeks the favorable attitude of employees by rewarding them bonuses and providing benefits for improved performance. On the other hand, unfavorable attitude are aroused in employees who are inwards in their desire for higher wages, recognition or good working condition. Individuals express their beliefs, philosophy and value their attitudes. A good Indian has attitude towards freedom and democracy, which reveals his benefits and expresses his character. Types of attitude: There can be three types of attitudes: positive, passive and negative. A positive attitude induces a person to react favorably towards another person, an issue, a policy, or an organization. Many industrial workers have a positive attitude favorable for labor unions and inciting participation in union activities. An individual’s attitude towards an issue, person or organization may be completely passive. As a result, he will have no opinion on issues or on the group. A worker who has passive attitude towards labor union will have no opinions on controversial questions involving union policy or activities. Similarly, attitude can also be negative, giving an individual an unfavorable opinion of a person, issue or organization. A negative attitude is usually accompanied by a feeling of unpleasantness or dissatisfaction. A worker may have a negative attitude towards labor unions. The negative attitude may create prejudice, which causes the worker to prejudge the aim and activities of labor unions without understanding their contribution to the welfare of workers. The attitude is very important because it eventually become opinions. Opinion is the public expression of active attitudes. The opinions of a person are activated by his attitudes, which are motivated by mental and physical forces that propel him to express his opinion. When these individual attitudes, resulting into individual opinion, are formed into a set of opinions, they form public opinion on a particular subject. The basic objective of PR publicity is to influence public opinion, which develops from the attitudes of individual comprising the public. However it cannot be overlooked that public opinion matters a lot in the public relations and a publicity strategy is formulated on the basis of the existing opinion about the subject. However, usually, public opinion is only a consideration in propaganda and the strategy aims at creating the one in its favour. Propaganda, simply put, is the manipulation of public opinion. It is generally carried out through media that is capable of reaching a large amount of people and effectively persuading them for or against a cause. Major points of difference between PR publicity and propaganda: While PR publicity may deal with: relation policies, l channels of communication media, developments & execution of promotional product publicity campaigns, at local, state and national levels, company, and also between investors in general, etc. Propaganda will remain an attempt to change opinions by persuasively presenting new ones. The propagandist attempts to alter the opinions of his subjects or viewers by convincing them of the validity of their own. In order of accomplish this, he or she uses a variety of methods and techniques. The purpose of propaganda is to change opinions, but more importantly to influence your decisions. Unlike PR publicity, it is usually less objective therefore.