Chapter 12: Public Relations and Framing the Message

This chapter was all about public relations. Public relations was brought about in order to defend against muckraking journalists and working unions. Phinaes Taylor was a famous theatrical agent who was notorious for his gross exaggeration, fraudulent stories, and staged events to secure newspaper coverage for his clients. I find it funny that he later ran a circus. He seems like the quintessential scum-bag agent seen in movies and sitcoms. Women were also able to claim a spot in the public relations industry since it was new at the time and not entirely claimed by men. The Public Relations Society of America defined public relations as "Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other."

Reaction to Big Pharm

The video is very informative. Some things that stuck out to me included the 'disease mongering', where they take everyday-normal conditions and turn them into medical problems, and how they take old pills that are losing their popularity, slap a new name on them, and sell them for way more money. In addition to that, they are given very expensive marketing campaigns which gains many uninformed consumers attention. It isn't fair since most consumers will not know about it without digging deep into the matter. The video inspires me to be careful when I get older about the types of medications I find myself under.

Reaction to Truth Merchants

The video was pretty interesting to me. It started off with a person working in public relations calling truth subjective, which I do not believe. Truth is and should be objective, and the opinions formed around it is what is subjective. However, this seems to be the basis of what public relations people do: try and give the public the truth that their clients want them to hear. I agree with the one media critic in the video that said something along the lines of not needing an over-paid adviser to help clean up his mistakes. Sometimes public relations can be a good thing for those clients that do have good intentions but are have their stories completely turned around. However, I feel that the opposite happens too often with public relations, with clients with none-too-noble intentions covering them up with the help of someone smooth-talking their way out of it.
Public relations definitely affects how my parents see things. I notice that if they hear it on television, they are most likely going to go along with the opinion, since there aren't many other sources of information.