Liquid truth

Truth is a liquid. So concluded Edward Bernays, who in the years between the two world wars invented the modern art and profession of public relations. Like an alchemist of mass consciousness, Bernays blended the crude ores of ordinary reality with lies and half-truths so seamlessly that even sceptics could not discern where the real ended and deception began. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays applied his uncle's insights into the individual psyche to the manipulation of mass psychology.

Today PR is global industry with annual profits of tens of billions of dollars and growing at 40-60 percent a year. Many PR companies are independent practices legitimately seeking greater visibility for their clients' work with press releases, press conferences, and author tours. But the larger firms exert massive influence using a wide range of intrusive and manipulative tactics that remain largely invisible to the public. The world's leading PR companies are based in the US and UK but maintain offices in scores of countries. Most couple their PR operations to much larger advertising divisions, offering ''integrated communications strategies'' in which advertisements project irresistible images while PR massages the messages from behind the projector. Much corporate public relations is neither public nor relational but stealthy and manipulative. Indeed, its effectiveness is in its invisibility. ''The best PR ends up looking like news,'' says a prominent practitioner: ''You'll never know when a PR agency is being effective; you'll just find your views slowly shifting.'' Media researchers estimate that 40 percent of what Americans see, hear, and read as news is actually just lightly-edited PR press releases. Another substantial portion consists of voices and faces placed by publicists supplying journalists with ready-made material. For anyone willing to pay the price, PR agencies promote and protect corporate and partisan agendas, democratic pols and image-challenged dictators. In such a high-stakes, high-priced industry, the great majority of clients are wealthy - major corporations, politicians, celebrities, and political parties with a powerful interest in advancing their agendas or maintaining a positive public image to camouflage dubious motives or personal and institutional misconduct. Many PR clients spend more money rebuilding their images than redressing the problems that first tarnished them, which they fear would be too expensive.

Indeed, corporate PR is so successful that many of its chief victims - progressive politicians, environmental, labour and social justice movements and others - turn to the same techniques (and often the same companies) to promote their own messages. On behalf of several global population organisations, a US foundation recently granted a major PR/ad agency 16 million dollars to inundate eight second-tier US cities with paid ads and PR strategies designed to brand international family planning like Coke and Toyota. But can a social cause be effectively marketed in the same fashion as a soft drink? And is something vital lost in the process? Like advertising, PR can be dismayingly effective in inducing people to do and believe in things that in their right minds they might not choose, like smoking or voting for a corrupt politician. But can PR induce people to think for themselves? Can it make them better citizens? Underlying PR is an unspoken assumption that most people are not capable of intelligent, independent thought and action and that ''for the greater good'' they must be programmed en masse to act in prescribed ways. ''It is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it,'' wrote Edward Bernays: ''The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society.'' Bernays' chilling vision has come to pass. But in the process it has so brain-damaged democracy that both the ''masses'' being manipulated and the invisible hands manipulating them have surrendered their responsibilities - and possibilities - as free and conscious beings. Only by refusing to be ''spun'' and reasserting the primacy of our own independent judgment can we reclaim our citizenship and with it revive a diminished democratic culture.