How Public Relations (PR) Hype can create Celebrities?

Lately, I've thought about an interesting category news. It all started when a few months ago, almost every newspaper supplement every day in the United Kingdom announced the sad death of Jade Goody on the front page. While it is certainly a sad event, when I saw this news grabbing 2 of the top 5 reads the news on BBC website two things clicked in my mind regarding the advertising campaign and celebrity PR and marketing strategies.

First, in Liverpool I had a fellow academic who studies in the area of ​​celebrities and their impact on the masses. He also happened to be a fanatical football fan and I remember him telling me he had read the number of a thousand biographies of celebrities (including many players and the show) and had concluded that there was almost no inspiration in those memories (BTW, Jade Goody had!). It was just a skill that he had put most of these people in the mainstream media and once you are there, we know that the human struggle to be there.

The second thought that came into my mind in relation to the power of high technology, public relations (PR). I could be completely wrong, but the BBC obituary of Jade Goody notes "... hit the headlines as a young woman with shockingly poor general knowledge, which was often the object of derision of his fellow tenants" (BBC, , 2009). However, when you just type in Google Jade Goody is discovered with 5,130,000 results. Among these is a Wikipedia print pages longer, the official website, the news (of course in terms of gossip), a website and a perfume FAN website (Yes. ..)!

Thinking about this I did another Google search for Prof. Amartya Sen (yes, yes, the Nobel Prize 1998) and returned with 659,000 entries. Forgive Prof. Sen for comparison.

However, this demonstrates the power of public relations and how PR firms to exploit it.

I am amazed to see that society as a whole what we really look for and how our thoughts can be manipulated. It reminds me of Edward Bernays - the father of public relations and the grandson of Sigmund Freud - who believed in manipulating society and the consequent public. In one of his seminal works of propaganda, 'he argued that the manipulation of public opinion is a necessary part of democracy. He has used with success in 'breaking the taboo against women smoking in public' and even helping the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International) and the U.S. government to facilitate the successful overthrow of the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.

Today, high tech public relations agencies have honed their skills with such finesse that a 'Miss Piggy' who reportedly thought a ferret was a bird, an abscess a green drink from France, that Pistachio painted the Mona Lisa, which there was a part of England called East Angular and that there was a language called Portuganese (Jeffries, 2009) obtained 2 of 5 and get better news on the BBC coverage of all the world media. I saw that almost never been achieved ...

Something is definitely going wrong in the macro-level social or think Bernays was right when he said: "The public has its rules and its own needs and habits. You can modify them, but they dare not in conflict with them." This is what we as today's news, is not it?

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Power of public relations ......