Moloney, K. (2006). Rethinking Public Relations. London: Routledge

Reviewed by: Tom Watson

What is engaging about Kevin Moloney’s book is that he discusses public relations as it is practised and not how North American liberals wish it was. He argues at considerable length that public relations is persistently practiced as a persuasive communication activity, and has been for almost all of the past 80 to 90 years in which it has been a distinct and increasingly used communication activity.

This has resulted in public relations becoming “weak propaganda” with no pretence to Grunigian symmetry. “PR in the UK has been, and still is, public communication designed to manipulate or persuade. It is weak propaganda – more ‘ordering’ and ‘telling’ than ‘listening’ and ‘talking’; with a selection of supportive facts and some appeals to emotion in the message …” (p.8).

He also describes PR practitioners are ‘hemispheric communicators’ – “those who draw attention to the positive values and behaviours of the interest they represent and not the negative”. (p.115)

Although academics and PR industry worthies may grind their teeth at this description (and others of his analyses), practitioners will largely understand and identify with Kevin Moloney’s approach. After all, they are advising clients and employers in order to gain advantage for that organisation and to persuade a host of targets to their cause, product, event, etc.

This second edition of Rethinking Public Relations is tighter and tougher than before, perhaps being more influenced by the discussions of political communication and its democratic impact within Bournemouth Media School’s Centre for Public Communication Research, of which the author is a member. From this base he views the relationship between journalism and public relations with criticism and some concern. He sees journalism, shorn of resources, as becoming increasingly weakened by its acceptance of information offered by PR people – “Many journalists are complicit in this process; they too often publish what they get with little or no amendment or declaration of its source …Journalists should treat PRs with scepticism bordering on polite hostility. (p.164).

But what of the “rethinking” of public relations that is offered in the book’s title. It largely comes in Moloney’s discussion of the inter-relation of PR and democracy; indeed the key chapter is entitled “Can PR and democracy co-exist?” His proposal is that there should be a redistribution of resources “in the name of social justice” which aims to give “equal ‘voicing’ amongst interests in a representative democracy”. This is achieved by monitoring differences in PR resources and “then private or public subsidy to transfer more of them to resource-poor, non-profit-seeking interests”. (p.87). The case is expressed in more detail as a “normative theory of equalising PR resources” (pp.79-83).

On reading this, my thoughts went immediately to exceptions where the lesser-resourced body won despite an apparent power imbalance between protagonists (e.g. the battle between Shell and Greenpeace over the proposed scuttling of the Brent Spar oil rig in the Atlantic, which was won by the David organisation and not the Goliath). Also, on any day, there are advocacy campaigns run by not-for-profit organisations which are effective in gaining media coverage, public support and the attention of political and governmental decision makers.

Putting aside scepticism and acknowledging that public funding of political parties is increasing in western democracies, there should be a wider discussion of Moloney’s proposal to subsidise PR activity in matters that affect the democratic process. This could be a genuine “rethinking of PR” and, as Moloney concludes, “…PR will spread more widely through the civil societies and the political economies of liberal economies. We cannot just wish PR away.” (p.176)

He has a challenging thesis rooted in a democratic and social justice stream and worthy of consideration by academics, practitioners and students.

About the reviewer: Dr Tom Watson joined Bournemouth University's Media School as Reader in Communication in January 2007. Before then, he was Associate Professor in Communication and Head of the School of Communication at Charles Sturt University (CSU) in Australia . At Bournemouth, Dr Watson is teaching corporate public relations to final year BA (Hons) Public Relations students and other units on Masters programmes, as well as continuing an active public relations research programme.

With Paul Noble, Dr Watson is the joint author of Evaluating PR: the best practice guide to planning, researching and evaluating public relations, published by Kogan Page. He was chairman of UK’s Public Relations Consultants Association from 2000 to 2002 and had a 25 year career in corporate and consultancy public relations before joining CSU in 2003.

Purchase information: The book is available from good bookstores or direct from Routledge at http://www.routledge.com/

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