A few days back, when I was making my way back to Leeds from London I got into chat with an elderly man-talkative, intelligent and knowledgeable. We talked about a lot of things during this four hour journey but one thing struck my mind and is still wandering around. He said, ” The biggest problem for the democracy is recipents of information (media) is not able to convey it fairly and independently. It is the matter of who pays the highest amount of money to them or the people who supply them the information.”
I didn’t get a chance to ask him who was he blaming ‘Public relations’ or ‘Media’ or the both??????????
I was going through different text books in order to find out a definition for Public affairs. What I found is that whenever the term ‘Public affairs’ is tried to be defined, most of the people associate it with lobbying. Its purpose is supposed to attain the power that enables an organisation to achieve preffered results in the political arena and to maintain a socio-political environment that is a favourable one. However, I believe that public affairs is more than lobbying politicians……’It is an ability to understand policies, decision making, government infrastructures and policy making. It requires a skill of knowing what makes media tick and how that impacts the politicians’. The people who are involved in public affairs need to be able to communicate effectively and they also need to know what their audience needs or expects.
Finally I got a definition, ” A study of power and in particular consists of an organised attempt to influence the decision taking within a political system”…….but is this how it should be defined???????????
Internet seems to have pierced the very length and breadth of our lives. It is having far reaching impact upon the way we live, we think and what not. Where as we cant sideline its profound impact upon societies and people in developed countries, the amount of impact lessens as developing countries enter the scence. Literacy rates and number of people having access to internet are issues in countries that are currently in a transient phase of economic transformation.
We may talk and debate the latest technologies, we may speak about the role of internet in furthering globalization, and we may speak of internet having eradicated geopolitical boundaries, once we speak in our context. But a big question mark stares blank upon our face thinking about the developing and underdeveloped countries. The challenge is of providing more people access to the technology of 21st century. The task though Herculean, is but the only way out to homogenize people, share thoughts. Ideas and harvest the real benefits of globalization
Internet is one the best and effective ways of communication and is probably the only channel that surpasses all other means of communication. Internet and PR are two distant cousins and the interaction between the both can lead to some significant communication excellence. Internet may be a boon or bane and it’s the ‘intention with which the message is sent ,moulds the credibility of the information and same applies for PR. It can be bad or good and is entirely up to an individual’s intentions. Public Relations on internet is not a new concept and companies are using it to communicate their policies such as CSR. It has changed the way of communication in democracies. PR through internet is more effective , as the message sent can reach to a wider audience without passing through gate keepers and the originality of the message is not lost . But its hard to filter the right from the wrong on internet and no one to judges the authenticity. It places the argument in an awkward position and we stop to ponder over it ! Do we need gatekeepers in order to improve the credibility of a message ???
“Combining the words ‘public relations’ and democracy positively is an extremely rare word coupling” ( Moloney, K)
Yes, it would rather be impossible to combine the two if Public relations is considered as ‘Voices’ of interest competing over material, ideological, and reputational advantage in market, capitalist, liberal democracies. However, ecnomist model of politics given by Posner (2003) compares a voter with a buyer who does not design the product/policy but choses from the list provided to him/her by the seller/political party. In representative democracies, where economist model is unavoidable, PR can be seen as a function of prime importance and I would rather say, ” existence of representative democracies depends on the co-existence of PR and democracy.”
Citizen journalism, a fairly new concept has been into talks for its potential of challenging the power of media gaints. Here is an example that may help in evaluating how successful it has been.
“As part of their campaign to demand a Congressional investigation of the Pentagon pundit scandal, FreePress has produced several YouTube videos providing analysis and coverage of the scandal that the TV networks themselves have largely ignored — not surprisingly, since the scandal documents the networks’ unethical journalistic practices. For years now, people have been talking about the potential of citizen journalism to challenge the power of the broadcast media behemoths. This scandal is the perfect opportunity to see how far we’ve come in achieving that goal. Let’s make sure the TV networks don’t get away with burying this story.”
While preparing for a presentation, I came across a video. One of the comments posted on it said, “I can imagine these conversations really taking place in the manipulative boardrooms of Hollywood P.R. agencies.” At first instance, my reaction was the same but when I watched it again, I found it more intresting and then watched it again with a totally different point of view. This time I could sense how beautiful a game P.R is rather than a being manipulative set up – It is about studying peoples behaviour, it is about knowing what people want and how they will behave under different set of circumstances. It is a science, a science of knowing what, people want.
I have some fade memories of stories of my childhood. I have not seen it happen- but there were stories galore in my childhood about the great discovery that changed the world of my birth place from being chained and dragged to the police stations. It is about radio and the role it played in changing the opinion of people towards the governments. I can remember ma grandpa telling me stories when in his childhood, people were punished for listening to the station other than government run ones in the days when there were only a few community radio sets installed by government. But I couldn’t find a reason to believe as I saw radio as a good form of media and a good dipenser of information.
However, the changing face of internet gave me a reason to believe. I can’t work out a time slot when internet changed from one way opinion moulder to a space of interaction. Being a space of interactive discussions, I can foresee it as a basis of real democracy where people have their say about what is happening around. Here is the document saying how Internet can help create a more informed electorate and encourage greater participation in our democratic process. http://www.microsoft.com/issues/essays/2000/02-21epolitics.mspx
Democracy as it exists in the dictionary meaning, is a right of an individual to run a society. However, in present day world of democracies, it is just the selection of the leaders that people do. Here is what is commented on democracy is defined in one of the blogs about pr and democracies : “Democracy as a plebiscite tool – solely to choose our leader – was very much a tool used by those great lovers of democracy, the Nazis“.
I wonder, is it me who has his blog and is writing his heart out. Anyway, I got a chance as my PR and new media module is being assessed on it. So Bloggers, let me introduce myself first, I am Omer Nazir, in second semester of my masters degree from Leeds Met university. I am from India, a place called, ” The largest democracy in the world” and in my childhood I thought, when I grow up, it would be my will and only my will that would decide the governing body of my place. As I grew up, I started thinking how would I decide who to choose as my leader. Yes, you got it right: it is the information I get from here and there, oh! it is media. But then if information dispersed to me is manipulated, the manipulation will influence my opinion or rather drive it.
To be honest, this thought struck my mind after reading Bernay’s comment where he atrributes the power of real driving force of democracy to Public relations and at the moment I read I got a strong desire of knowing more and commenting more about it. So lets get going………………….
I was going through different text books in order to find out a definition for Public affairs. What I found is that whenever the term ‘Public affairs’ is tried to be defined, most of the people associate it with lobbying. Its purpose is supposed to attain the power that enables an organisation to achieve preffered results in the political arena and to maintain a socio-political environment that is a favourable one. However, I believe that public affairs is more than lobbying politicians……’It is an ability to understand policies, decision making, government infrastructures and policy making. It requires a skill of knowing what makes media tick and how that impacts the politicians’. The people who are involved in public affairs need to be able to communicate effectively and they also need to know what their audience needs or expects.