The study of history can be, at times of media polemics as the one now ravaging the Indian media, fun,fascinating and immensely valuable.

How PR, or more specifically political PR,a la Nira Radia Tapes, emerged as a powerful tool and a full-time preoccupation in America can be gauged from the fact that in the US today there are a couple of lakhs of practitioners who call themselves ”public relation specialists". Numbers apart, the expansion in all forms of PR-political,corporate and international lobbying has some sordid tales to tell.

The growing influence of Public Relations in America in the twentieth century was an offshoot of industrialization. If industrialization brought about a host of social and economic changes,creating pressures that led business,government and other leaders to try new strategies to deal with the changing environment, organisations added PR practioiners to their staffs or hired outside counsel.

Public relation practitioners often argue that their role is to present clients’ view on an issue before the court of public opinion or in the marketplace of ideas. They assert that every individual or organisation has a right to speak before the public-whether to sell circus tickets or peddle a political candidate. If Nira Radia was batting for A Raja for the Telecom Minister’s job, she was only following the annals of a profession elsewhere .But to say that PR always makes positive contributions to the society is taking the argument too far. Even in the PR history of America, the profession has not necessarily been a democratic force. Obviously,as times changed the PR men sometimes used their knowledge for the public good.

Ivy Lee, often called the father of public relations, in early twentieth -century America, emphasised upon openness in dealing with the press. Of course, he did not always adhere to his own philosophy,but his efforts created a new profession from what had been mere press agentry.

Lee insisted that all publicity must take on the dual role of informing the people and of advising the client about how to align activities with public interests.’The great publicity man,he said,is the man who advises his client as to what policy he shall pursue,which,if pursued,would create favourable publicity,and once the policy was set,publicize it.’

Some American scholars argue that the increasingly active role of public relations in political policy making has been detrimental to the democratic process. Of course,the increasing importance of corporate PR has made the practice a more dominant force in politics. Yet PR is not part of a classical democratic theory which posited the press as an intelligence service for the people.

Public Relations may have changed dramatically in the past few years in India,particularly after the liberalization of the Indian economy. But as another American pioneer of the profession, Edward L Bernays, had admitted, as back as in 1971, that public relations,like any other profession ,can be abused and used for anti-social purposes. The discrepancy between the ideal model of PR for social good and the reality of PR practice has not altered much since then. PR techniques and practices like the Nira Radia tape can be lethal to democratic governance.

Gore Vidal once said:the corporate grip of opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No first world country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity-much less dissent.