ABSTRACT
We can look back to 1900 in the USA and see the beginnings of the public relations that we recognise today. We can look to the 1920s in the UK for that point of recognition, and if Dr Who, the scarfed time traveller, was a PR man, he would find the work then similar to now.1 With this history, perhaps the Spectator magazine was too cautious when it heralded PR as the ‘profession of the decade’ in 1998, and Michie too narrow when he declared the UK ‘in the midst of a PR explosion’ in the same year. Indeed, so well fitted to Britain was PR in the last century that three authors gave it the title of ‘fifth estate’, adding it after the fourth estate of a free press to the traditional sites of power in the realm.2 In this vein, Miller and Dinan (2000) were right to argue that PR people played an important, identifiable role in the political and economic changes in the UK of the 1980s.3
