If there’s one thing that nags the bejesus out of me, it’s when I hear something characterized as “public relations” when it doesn’t even closely resemble that discipline … which is quite a lot of the time, frankly. The Washington Post broke a story last week, of particular relevance to North Carolinians, that perfectly illustrates my point.
The Post came into possession of some bootlegged copies of storyboards outlining three 30-second videos Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina commissioned as part of an opening salvo aimed against the Obama administration’s health care reform efforts. The predictable irony was that

Capstrat produced several video storyboards for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina. The company hired Capstrat to launch a campaign resisting insurance reform, even while Blue Cross representatives were making a show of support for Obama administration initiatives.
BCBSNC’s behind-the-scenes scheming was concurrent with some very public declarations of cooperation toward change issued by leaders of the insurance industry, including national representatives of Blue Cross.
The storyboards were the handiwork of a Raleigh-based consultant, Capstrat, which bills itself as a “strategic communications firm,” but is known to Triangle residents simply as a public relations agency, and was referenced as such by the Post writer. And yet, the operative reality is that Capstrat is anything but a public relations agency. It is exactly what it claims to be: a communications company, and apparently one that pretty much whores itself out to anyone in need of a finely honed bit of propaganda to fuel whatever self-serving, closed-minded agenda the client — BCBSNC, in this case — hopes to beat over the heads of whomever will submit. Ruefully I’d note, this pattern of so-called PR practice is pretty much the industry standard.
Virtually across the board, public relations companies serve simply as media relations toadies for clients, both private and public, hoping to better manipulate their reputations or browbeat stakeholders into adoration, submission or silence. It’s this arcane, parochial role, pursued uniformly and without dissent among practitioners in the field, that results in the laity’s universal misunderstanding of and general antipathy toward public relations. The outcome is understandable, given the lack of visionary thinking in professional circles about what public relations practice might possibly become in gifted hands.
Which explains why debate concerning the nature of public relations is woven into the fabric of PR training from day one in the classroom. Scholars in the field invariably begin the discussion synthesizing a definition of public relations. And unlike, say, sociology, economics, business or political science (all of which, by the way, are integral to a sophisticated command of public relations), it’s a task easier said than done, and often leads to revealing debate.
By one 70s-era scholar’s reckoning, more than 470 different definitions of public relations were floating around at that time, hardly a groundswell of consensus. I assure you, the situation hasn’t improved much by 2009, either. (As a teaching assistant in graduate school, I once told a class that, given my way, any PR student who couldn’t rattle off his own operating definition of public relations on command come commencement day would be denied a diploma. I suspect the number of PR degrees awarded each year would plummet to nearly zero.)
Granted, if we’re strolling through the academic community, there’s at least some unanimity on certain traits, most notably in the emphasis on PR’s management function. And yet, oddly, most PR faculty are not seated within schools of business or management. [I’ll spare you my excursus on the deleterious misalignment of PR curricula within the j-schools and comm studies departments of higher education.] Consequently, lectures extolling the importance of a public relations presence in executive management are ineffectual against the easy-rolling undertow of communication science, which sucks gullible, unreflective students into the relatively accessible channels of writing and media relations, convincing them it’s better for employment cachet to beef up their portfolios with tangible end products. The system is great at churning out technicians with no critical management savvy, kids with no hope (or aspiration, for that matter) of attaining positions of strategic leadership within the dominant coalition. And in spite of instructors’ repeated turns squeezing ethics into class discussion, most students don’t really believe those matters will ever come into play in the tiny realm of their eagerly anticipated agency cubicles. Which brings me back to Capstrat and its storyboards.
You see, once you’ve built your business on the model of farming out technical skills in the service of messaging (Capstrat likes to call them “stories,” but judging by the storyboards, I’m more inclined to regard them as fairy tales), it really doesn’t matter much exactly what the message is so long as it’s the one the client is paying for.
At its finest, public relations practice engages stakeholders in a lively roundtable of interaction that forever remains open to the possibility of change and movement among all the relating parties, including and perhaps most especially, the one managing those relationships. Looking at the leaked storyboards (“preliminary” though they might be) and analyzing our way back, it’s obvious this higher vision wasn’t in the minds and intentions of BCBSNC, nor its agent, Capstrat. (There’s no need to cover all the gruesome details here. For those interested, non-profit research group Media Matters offers an incisive rundown of BCBS’s contradictory behavior.)
If propaganda is defined as the systematic communication of a doctrine with intent to elicit compliance or ascent, then Capstrat is clearly complicit with Blue Cross and Blue Shield in waging a propaganda campaign. The storyboards generously utilize card stacking (selectively presenting facts) and name calling (labeling without regard to applicability), both persuasive techniques historically characteristic of propaganda. In fact, the Capstrat storyboards are a monument in themselves to selective omission, not only because they don’t present facts, but also because they depict Washington insiders as incapable or unwilling to address basic questions. Capstrat even employs what’s called a Plain Folk technique by positioning the insurance industry in sympathetic association with a bewildered Hispanic woman seeking answers to medical needs — the only ethnic reference in the three storyboards, incidentally, and a transparent appeal to North Carolina’s rapidly expanding immigrant population.
But wait, that’s not all! There’s a personal connection here that further muddies the ethical waters. According to reporter John Murawski of The News & Observer, Capstrat founder and CEO Ken Eudy stood in as best man at Bob Greczyn’s wedding … that’s BCBSNC’s helmsman Bob Greczyn. Well, if that doesn’t lend a whole new level of meaning to “sleeping with the enemy.” I guess Eudy must’ve forgotten all about the PRSA core principle addressing conflicts of interest when he said “I do” to Bob on that one, eh? Oh yeah, I forgot, Capstrat doesn’t practice public relations. Yep, no denying that one.
I could wax cynical for hours about what a shameless example of “public relations” Capstrat represents to the profession, but that wouldn’t change Capstrat or the public’s skewed perceptions of PR in the least. And it might only lead to further confusion about what, precisely, constitutes public relations … at least as it’s defined among those of us who’ve studied it and appreciate its potential to enrich a democratic society and improve the functions of commerce.
For now, let’s just recognize Capstrat for what it is: a keenly whetted tool of propaganda.