Spin Cycles
A century of spin: Episode 1
A Series about Spin, the Spinners and the Spun by Ira Basen for CBC Radio The Sunday Edition
January 19, 2007
CBC News
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MimoMander. This is a documenary radio series on for the next five weeks. You can listen to it on-line. Same time, same place, every week. This series is all "Freud meets Ogilvy" material. If you listen to it, we (or at least I) might be better able to understand what you're trying to tell us. At the very least, you might enjoy hearing the idears on techniques.
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Spin Cylcles
One of the questions I am trying to answer in this series is "how did we get here?" Part of this is to satisfy my own curiosity. Before I got into journalism, I was a graduate student in history, so I have a congenital fascination with the past. But beyond that, I really do believe that you can't understand the present without knowing the past. It may be true that "spin" has always been with us, but it didn't always look the way it does today, and there are social, political, economic and technological forces that determine the shape that spin assumes at any given moment.
So it was important for me in this first program to spend some time exploring the history of spin, or more specifically, modern public relations, and to begin to trace the rocky relationship between the press and public relations that is now 100 years old. Fortunately, the founding fathers of public relations are both complex and fascinating men with compelling stories to tell. What continues to amaze me about both Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee is how little-known they are. My graduate work was in American history, and I studied a lot of 20th-century American history, but I don't recall ever reading anything about Bernays or Lee. This is extraordinary when you consider how so much of what they did continues to influence us today.
Early history: Ivy Lee
Ivy Lee's legacy is complicated. He was responsible for much of what is now part of the standard PR tool kit: press conferences, photo ops, media tours, press releases etc. He really did believe in opening up American business leaders to the public and the press, and he tried to convince the "robber barons" of the day, like John D. Rockefeller Jr., that they needed to improve their behaviour if they wanted to generate positive publicity.
But Lee was reviled by many journalists of the day, who considered him a paid liar who was prepared to represent anyone who would pay his fee. Those critics appeared to be vindicated in the 1930s, when Lee took a contract with the Nazi regime in Germany, who wanted advice on how to improve their image in the U.S. Lee travelled to Germany and met with Nazi leaders. He did not wind up doing any work for them and eventually walked away from his $25,000 contract. But when word got out that he had been involved with the Nazis, the press jumped all over him. Newsweek's headline screamed "Lee Exposed as Hitler Press Agent." Shortly afterwards, Lee suffered a stroke and died at the age of 57.
The only biography of Ivy Lee is more than 40 years old, and was written more to praise Lee than analyze him. It is not easily available. For this program, I interviewed a leading New York PR executive and author named Fraser Seitel, who knows a great deal about Lee. One of the interesting things about Seitel is that for the past few decades, his main client has been the Rockefeller family, so he is following the footsteps of Ivy Lee, who also represented the Rockefellers for many years. It was Lee, working alongside William Lyon Mackenzie King, who helped rehabilitate the Rockefeller's reputation following the Ludlow massacre in 1915. I interviewed Fraser Seitel in the Rockefeller offices at Rockefeller Center in New York. You can read portions of that interview.
Another useful source of information about the early history of public relations was Stuart Ewen, whose book, PR: A Social History of Spin, is the best book on the subject. Ewen is more critical of Lee than Seitel. You can read parts of my interview with Ewen about Ivy Lee.
Edward Bernays
Edward Bernays is an endlessly fascinating figure who was profoundly influential in 20th-century America. A double nephew of Sigmund Freud, he married Freud's theories on the unconscious with a PR man's understanding of how to get his story into the press, to turn PR into the marketing juggernaut it is today. Among other things, he was involved in campaigns to get women to smoke, convince Americans to eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, and buy more hardcover books for their home libraries. Bernays died in 1995 at the age of 103, and he was actively spinning his legacy as the father of public relations right to the end. He was the subject of a recent, highly readable biography by journalist Larry Tye. Bernays himself wrote several books that are hard to find but still worth reading. One of them, Propaganda, has recently been re-issued. You can read my interviews with Larry Tye and Stuart Ewen about Bernays.
Chet Burger
Another valuable source for information about the early history of PR was Chet Burger. At 86 years old, Burger is himself a PR pioneer, having worked for AT&T for roughly 40 years. Before that, he was a pioneer in TV news broadcasting. He went to work for the fledgling TV division of CBS right after the Second World War. He filed one of the first TV news stories in history. In those days, they didn't know what to call someone who did what he did. He wasn't really a reporter, because reporters only worked in print. So his official job title was "visualizer," and when you think about it, that is what TV reporters do; they visualize the news.
Chet Burger also was a pioneer in the field of media training, now a multibillion-dollar industry that helps business people and politicians learn how to speak to the press. In the 1970s, while at AT&T, Burger wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review that for the first time discussed how business executives should prepare for being interviewed by the press. I spent a delightful afternoon with Chet Burger in his New York apartment, and you can read parts of our conversation.
What you learn from studying the lives and legacies of Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays is that they represent all that is positive and all that is negative in modern public relations. Before they came along, the operating principle for American business was "the public be damned." Lee, in particular, believed in informing the public, but only insofar as that information did not damage the interests of his clients. Still, journalists today owe him a debt of gratitude for opening up the corporate world as it had never been opened before. It is harder to find a positive "spin" on the legacy of Edward Bernays, who often seemed to operate in a moral vacuum, a charge often made, however unfairly, about public relations practitioners today.
Canadian spin
And finally, a brief word about the Canadian public relations industry. It lagged behind the Americans' by about 25 years. Ivy Lee opened the first independent PR shop in the U.S. in 1904. The first Canadian shop didn't open until 1930. It was started by a former Toronto newspaperman named Jimmy Cowan. Before that, you could find people doing publicity work in various federal government departments and large corporations like the banks and railroads, but not working as independents.
Public relations in Canada is primarily a post-Second World War phenomenon. In fact, many leading Canadian PR people in the 1950s and '60s learned their craft by working as public affairs officers in the Canadian army during the war. The booming post-war Canadian economy finally created the conditions for the PR industry to thrive. The Canadian Public Relations Society was established in 1948, with chapters in Toronto and Montreal, marking the professionalization of an industry that had come a long way since the days of press agents in shiny suits.
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