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testimony. The public had a right to know, he said, “when a man is presenting an argument, whether he represents himself, or is paid by someone else. It is one thing to inform the public mind: another thing to deceive it.”4
Baker’s reservations about the helping hand that provides authoritative information have proven prescient. One hundred years after his exposure of the railroad’s manipulations, opinion-makers—often working behind the scenes—help shape our daily news. Public relations professionals inundate the press with news releases that reporters often use to determine a frame for a story and, sometimes, run parts of news releases verbatim. Speechwriters equip public officials with talking points that, if well constructed, appear as sound bites on news broadcasts and even shape discussion by anchors and press analysts. Various corporate and government interests hire firms to produce video news releases designed for TV newscasts. Resource-strapped newsrooms sometimes find the videos compelling and use them without significant editing or additional reporting. Finally, some government and corporate interests hire and train individuals who appear, without disclosure, as expert sources in print news or as authoritative commentators on newscasts.
Critics have observed these developments for some time, but too often with an ahistorical view. Indeed, scholars have studied for decades the nature of the often tension-filled relationships between public relations and journalism, but those works mostly explore how the two industries try to rationalize the uneasy dynamics at play.5 Other critics focused on how the political economy of journalism has led to a press reliance on material from PR practitioners; this perspective influences, for example, Oscar Gandy’s observations that public relations provides an information subsidy to the press (a subject that this work further examines in chapter 6).6 And scholars such as Schudson (1978), Marchand (1998), Mayhew (1997), and Sproule (1997) did not explore sufficiently how the simultaneous expansion of public relations practices aligned well with the demands of the professionalizing press.7
This book works to fill that gap by examining how key events of the interwar years led to an enduring—and often problematic—relationship between public relations and the professional press. Rather than explore