Public-relations professionals do not simply help their clients to communicate with the public, they also create news—many of the news stories that one reads and watches come from materials provided by PR firms. For example, women’s smoking stopped being a taboo when Edward Bernays, hired by American Tobacco Company asked his women friends to smoke during an Easter parade on New York’s Fifth Avenue (1929). This image of women smoking in public appeared in newspapers, and Bernays, a nephew of Freud, used psychology to build the image of an emancipated woman as one who smoked. Public relations is not simply a press-wing for different big corporations, governments and non-profit organizations; its professionals exert the power of persuasion by gauging cultural trends and representing them to the public in a way that is beneficial to its clients, thus affecting social policies and the cultural landscape.

PR professionals are recruited not only from young people who have specialized degrees, but are also former journalists and retired politicians who know the system of the press, the government and their relationship with the public. These firms specialize in issue and crisis management. Hence, when Cyanide-tainted Tylenol was found in 1982, resulting in seven deaths, its manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson spent millions to rebuild its image; by promoting itself as a socially responsible company, PR helped it successfully overcome this crisis.

In contemporary America, more than $10 billion is spent on public relations annually.

With fewer journalists and the price of investigative news reporting high, news divisions are relying on PR news releases to fill up their pages and airtime. There are more people working for PR than for news; they provide sophisticated press packages and video clips that may be published without changes.

Government policies are affected when corporations hire public-relations firms to found so-called grassroots citizen campaigns to lobby Washington and other local and state governments. National Smokers Alliance, a group that champions smokers’ rights, was created by a PR firm with money from Phillip Morris. The government itself has also relied on PR, from the setting-up of the office of War Information during the Second World War to spin-doctors hired by different administrations. Not only American government, but foreign governments, like Kuwait, during the Gulf War, and Colombia, also hire big American PR firms to build their image. Other non-profit organizations also hire PR firms (for example, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, to promote an antiabortion message).

The image of the PR professional remains rather unsavory in media, especially when associated in the 1990s with political lies and manipulation (Wag the Dog, 1998; Primary Colors, 1999; television’s Spin City, ABC, 1996–).