Understanding Public Relations Literacy

PR is the attempt by information, persuasion, and adjustment to engineer public support for an activity, cause, movement or institution - Edward Louise Bernays
Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics - IPRA
Simple and straightforward, IPRA’s definition of PR focuses on the basic concept of public relations - as a communication process, one that is strategic in nature and emphasizing ‘mutually beneficial relationships. ‘Process’ is preferable to ‘management function,’ which can evoke ideas of control and top-down, one-way communications. ‘Relationships’ relates to public relations’ role in helping to bring together organizations and individuals with their key stakeholders. ‘Publics’ is preferable to ‘stakeholders,’ as the former relates to the very ‘public’ nature of public relations, whereas ‘stakeholders’ has connotations of publicly-traded companies. 
Public relations literacy has been conceptualized as ‘the ability to create, identify, analyze, and evaluate public relations messages’. Thus, public relations messages are not limited to those messages produced by the ‘PR industry’ but also include those messages produced by social movements, organizations, and individuals seeking to persuade others through all forms of media as well as in interpersonal and public contexts.

Public relations messages are strategic; they reflect the particular values and goals of their source and are designed to influence people. Public relations literacy encourages people to interrogate the ways in which public relations messages construct – and perhaps re-construct – situations through framing and how they propose responses or resolutions to the situations.  Thus public relations literacy would benefit consumers of public relations actions and messages because literacy would empower them to be more aware publics.

To be public relations literate, a person must be able to identify when public relations is being utilized, be aware public relations does impact society and individuals, have frameworks for analyzing public relations efforts, and apply critical thinking skills to their evaluation. When considering public relations literacy, we, the PR educators, should encourage people to identify the sources behind the messages and consider how and why such sources benefit by strategically framing specific messages in particular ways.

Public relations literacy is useful as it requires knowledge of the public relations practice, active critical thinking skills and motivation to scrutinize the messages. Also, people may not possibly evaluate all messages they come across but public relations literacy can empower these people to select the ideas and issues that are most likely to affect them so that they can act to protect their own self-interests.

Hence, it is important that we should acknowledge the strong persuasive aspect of public relations. Public relations not only shares information with others but also pursue objectives that ultimately do seek to change how people behave. Public relations create messages that seek to influence people. People have the right to evaluate these messages and decide whether or not to follow the prescribed course of action. Part of this evaluation requires that the public must also understand the reasons and purpose behind the message creation. More specifically, people should understand who the persuader is and what the persuader stands to gain in the situation.

People need to be equipped with tools to help them identify the hidden purpose in public relations messages, the main aspect of public rela­tions literacy. By revealing hidden purpose, public relations literacy can help in creating empowered publics. Therefore, we the PR educators, should encourage people to identify the source behind the message(s) and consider how and why such source(s) benefit by strategically designing specific messages in particular ways. Format of a message can suggest how people should interpret that message, and, by implication, what they should do in response to such messages.

Thank you for reading J


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