Who Pays For The Message?

A new algorithm is making PR messaging more effective. But you should still know whose agenda is being pushed.

- Lloyd Gedye

From a young age the genre of science fiction always struck me as a fascinating tool with which to engage and critique the world around us. While at university, I was particularly enamoured with William S. Burroughs’ Nova Trilogy and The Red Night Trilogy. So last year, when I found Barry Miles’ 2014 biography William S. Burroughs: A Life, I jumped at the opportunity to discover more about Burroughs.

I didn’t really like what I found. However, while reading Miles’s book, I did discover that Burroughs’ oldest uncle on his mother’s side was Ivy Ledbetter Lee, proclaimed by many to be the founder of public relations (PR), with his company Parker & Lee issuing the world’s first press release, detailing an Atlantic City train wreck, in 1906.

As Miles writes, Lee “specialised in devising propaganda for clients despised by the public for their anti-union and strikebreaking activities”.

He was nicknamed “Poison Ivy” by writer Upton Sinclair after the Colorado state and private security hired by John D. Rockefeller Jr’s Standard Oil Company opened fire on a tent city of striking miners. The action became known as the Ludlow Massacre, with Lee arguing that the miners had been killed because of an overturned stove.