The period of multimedia is an age of illusion wherein tale spinners thrive to serve self-serving interest. It’s called public relation (PR) work and the tale spinner is called a PR man, if only to make it sound acceptable as a profession that creates illusion akin to an act of dropping a huge pillow that cushion the minds against anxiety.

        Tale spinners are cogs in the PR industry, penetrating publications, networks and multimedia platforms to deliver the magic of words in an endless cascade of polysyllables that lull the auditor’s critical faculties.

        Like a product package spiked with myths, the tale spinners create selling points of candidates to the voters during elections and the incumbent officials after elections. At different periods, a PR man shifts methods that consistently follow the principle of protecting self-serving clients.

        In the words of the recognized ‘father of public relations’, Edward L. Bernays: “The counsel on public relations is what sociologists call a societal technician who is fitted by training and experience to evaluate the maladjustments and adjustments between his client and the public upon whom the client is dependent for his socially sound activity”. Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, was explaining to anxious corporate executives to whom he was selling his services using Freudianism’s scientific claims as a sort of marketing hook. He left behind a legacy of a high-powered British PR firm that handles PR service to such big names like Arnold Schwarzeneger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Hugh Grant and Pamela Anderson.

        Umberto Eco, world renown Italian literary critic, novelist, and semiotician (student of signs and symbols), observed that “the rise of science accompanied a communications revolution, beginning with the printing press and continuing into the modern age of electronic media, every new means of communication carries within itself a means of deception”.

        Just as the invention of language made lying possible, the invention of mass media created newer, more sophisticated, subtle, elaborate techniques of propaganda.

        The news media is a natural target for the third party technique, both because of the ability to reach millions of people and because the public expects journalists to serve as neutral sifters of the truth. The PR industry has mastered the art of putting its words into the journalists’ mouths, relying on the fact that most reporters are spread to thin to engage in time-consuming investigative journalism and therefore rely heavily on information from corporate- and government-sourced news releases.

        The news release, as we know today, was invented in the 1920s by early PR practitioner Ivy Lee, a former journalist himself who realized that the more information his clients provided to reporters, the less likely the reporters would go out and investigate for themselves.

        At contemporary times, the economic and political power wielders in the society go beyond press releases by creating built-in department that takes care of the propaganda or directly penetrating and controlling news media with columnists, opinion makers and reporters to serve self-serving interest.

        What distinguishes public relations from advertising is the use of third party technique to deal with the public or other entities relevant to the power base of self-serving interest of clients.

        The most leverage will be when the PR man, department or firm supplies useful information to influential reporters and analysts who have large audiences. The reporters and analysts become third-party endorsers that work on the judgment of readers, viewers or listeners.

        Beware. The next time you read, see or hear third-party endorsement of private and public entities, most likely, it’s a propaganda intended to create illusion of goodness and truth processed through the enterprising creative minds of tale spinners bound to the self-serving interest of their clients or bosses.