Warfare and Public Relations

Warfare and Public Relations History

The rise of the modern public relations practice throughout the 20th century is intimately connected to warfare. President Woodrow Wilson formed the Committee on Public Information (CPI) during World War I. More commonly known as the Creel Committee, named after its chair, newspaper editor George Creel—the CPI was made up of leading newspaper editors, advertising writers and several figures in the nascent public relations field, including Edward Bernays and Carl Byoir.

The Creel Committee's campaign in support of America's involvement in the war was among the first public relations efforts to utilize a comprehensive range of communication tactics to achieve its aims, from newspaper articles, editorials, and advertisements warning against enemy spies to the Four-Minute Men, a corps of trained public speakers who blanketed the country with messages in support of the war. In addition to winning widespread financial and emotional support for the war, the Creel Committee's messages reached nearly every corner of the country despite the lack of a national mass media or universal literacy. This success shaped the views of Byoir and Bernays on the role of mass and interpersonal channels to influence publics.

During World War II, the U.S. effort to gain support for the war was directed by the Office of War Information (OWI), which served functions similar to the Creel Committee. The OWI had more media tools, including feature-length motion pictures, newsreels, and radio broadcasts.

After World War II, the U.S. military's public relations activities were centralized in the Department of Defense and by the 1960s over 1,000 members of the armed forces were assigned public information or public affairs duties. Despite this, the Vietnam War was largely seen as both a military and a public relations failure. The U.S. involvement in the war developed slowly, and its aims were more difficult to explain. Furthermore, in previous wars, the military was able to censor newsreel film footage showing American casualties. In Vietnam, such footage was shown on evening newscasts, and the antiwar movement was able to leverage media coverage and direct influence tactics to turn opinion against the war. [Page 968]Many military professionals believed that if public opinion had not turned against the war, the United States might have prevailed. While it is impossible to ascertain the veracity of this judgment, the perception that media coverage of battle adversely affected public opinion was to influence military public relations policy from that point forward.

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