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Book Review: The Father of SPINPosted Thursday, May 19, 2005 Book Review: “The Father of Spin” by Larry Tye Edward Bermays and the Birth of Public Relations, New York: 1998  Larry Tye is a journalist with the Boston Globe. This book is one of the first on Bernays since his death at 103 and paints a rather disjoined view of the man, his campaign and his work in fathering an industry – public relations.Tye obviously has issues as any journalist would trying to tell the story of public relations. Type seems to get hung up on ethics and his professions dislike for anything PR. Thus the title he chose is “Father of Spin”. Tye says in the preface that he wanted to know more about Bernays the man and “how PR had influenced my profession of journalism.” He discusses Bernays and his individual failures, but as we have seen in reason cases with the NY Times journalism’s failures are not addressed. Working with interviews and the collected papers of Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Tye moves from his first campaigns, then his life and closes by delving into the issue of whether he is the “father” of public relations. The overall impression is less of a book and more like three essays compiled at different times by Larry Tye. What I find missing most is any effort to get behind the stories and find the real story of public relations – of not what he did – but why it worked. The tie between Bernays and Freud could have been a book in itself. Although Tye discusses the relationship, he does not examine how Bernays employed concepts of group psychology as propaganda tools. I found the first half of the book dynamic as he explored the American Tobacco case and the United Fruit episode, but the last half was boring as he ventured into biographical elements of the Ed Bernays family and wife. He does however explore some of the concepts of Bernays. I recommend Chapter 3 - The Big Think. Tye discusses Bernays’ idea of the Big Think or what we today call “strategic communications planning”. I was surprised at how little the book addressed the techniques put forward in Bernay’s books, Crystallizing Public Opinion and Propaganda. |