ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews more than 400 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files of prominent journalists and publications along with relevant secondary source, asserts that the balance of power overwhelmingly favored the FBI rather than the journalist covering the Bureau. The FBI held a cache of information that was valuable to journalists because crime news was valued by the public. The goal of organizational public relations, is to aggregate a community of meaning within a strategically composed public who share the organizations preferred understandings of itself and its contexts. A young Bureau official, J. Edgar Hoover, coordinated and led the execution of the Palmer Raids. Hoovers friends in the media were favored with access to details of the FBIs most dramatic cases in exchange for their fealty and uncompromising willingness to accede to the Bureaus conditions for collaboration. FBI public relations was, characterized by coercion through the awarding of access to FBI information and officials.
