Tarique A Bhat
“… if the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying ‘Circus Coming to the Exhibition ground ‘, that’s advertising. If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that’s promotion. If the elephant walks through some celeb’s flower bed, that’s publicity. And if you get the celebrity to laugh about it, that’s public relations.”
Designing publicity campaigns is a science and an art as well. When it comes to publicity of incumbent government, there are several professional methods one can apply to promote its “extraordinary” activities through the media.
Publicity blitzes, promotions, creating news and getting media attention needs sheer exuberant creativity and intelligence which may enable state government to impart more generally a sense of stature, scope and profundity. Official Public relations which is mainly media coverage here, does not rely on creative presentation of the facts.
This government propaganda machinery has a mandate to give state government some credibility among people. It is unfortunate that these non-professional practitioners of rhetoric have weakened and stripped off target orientation label of Omer led coalition to such an extent that it is in need of the support of such empty and false notions every day. Information Department trumpets daily schedules of ministers on daily basis from Doordarshan and pirate cable platforms. Reports suggest that DD hierarchy was summoned by apex legislature House for not highlighting proceedings of assembly and Legilative Council as desired. It is after this whipping that DD painted everything as “His Masters voice”. It seems that PR & Information zealots here are operating in a time warp.
To persuade an audience the spokesperson must be credible, someone the audience can trust and look up to, and he must be able to speak directly to the audience’s feelings or values in a positive way in order to have an logical, emotional or ethical impact.
The greatest lure of publicity orientation activities of government is that on surface it may appear to pose no intellectual problems about what it is and what it does.
Our PR and information department is apparently following, though in a very crude way, the young Machiavelli Edward Louis Bernays widely eulogized as the “father of public relations”. In Propaganda (1928), his most important book, Bernays argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. .. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
In our state Propagandists not the PR people represent special interests against the public interest. The tag of ‘shoeshine and smile’ is apt on these self styled PR people. These “sales” people who have confined Public Relations into Press Relations or ‘column-centimetre’ need to learn the art and science of PR.
