ABSTRACT
The role of persuasion in public relations is the focus of considerable controversy. Edward Bernays (1955) initially posited that persuasion was integral to public relations. Bernays defined the function of public relations in terms of using “information, persuasion, and adjustment to engineer public support for an activity, cause, movement, or institution” (1955, pp. 3-4). He and Ivy Ledbetter Lee viewed the role of the public relations practitioner as an advocate in the arena of public opinion, much as a lawyer is an advocate in the courtroom: as “pleader to the public of a point of view” (Bernays, 1923, p. 57). Unlike Lee, however, Bernays was the first to view public relations as in the modern vernacular of strategic communication. He argued that the public relations practitioner “engineers consent” by “creating symbols which the public will respond to, analyzing the responses of the public, finding strategies that resonate with receivers, and adapting communication to receivers” (1923, p. 173). In Bernays’ vision of public relations, persuasion is an integral function of public relations and, given the essential role that he envisioned public relations would play in democratic society, “persuasion… is an inseparable part of a democratic way of life” (1955, p. 8).
