Business

Public Relations Means Propaganda

Public relations is propaganda designed to influence viewers’ attitudes and behaviors. Just look at BP — the oil corporation saved itself from ruin after its 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster through branding and advertising. The devastated Gulf of Mexico, its wildlife and its people, however, could not.
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Public Relations Means Propaganda

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August 21, 2025 06:57 EDT
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How does a company bounce back after destroying the Gulf of Mexico? (Sorry, Gulf of America. *eyeroll*) Sweet, sweet corporate propaganda, that’s how!

“Beyond darkness, there is light … beyond fear, courage … beyond power, responsibility…” So begins the award-winning copy in British multinational oil and gas company BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” ad campaign. Sounding very much like an overly-serious Spider-Man cartoon, these ads ran from 2000 to 2008, brainwashing the public into thinking that BP was mostly interested in … solar energy? Wind farms? Responsible use of superhero abilities? It’s unclear. But what is clear is that BP was moving “beyond petroleum.”

This is funny because BP, once known as British Petroleum, is still very much about extracting sweet, sweet crude out of the ground. In fact, BP CEO Bob Dudley even said in 2013 that the company had given up on solar energy since it was unprofitable. BP is one of only six or seven “supermajors,” the biggest oil and gas companies on earth. After eight years of hearing that BP was moving “beyond” dirty old fossil fuel, a third of people surveyed thought it was now a “green” company.

Then in 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, vomiting about 206 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. Don’t forget, just one quart of oil can contaminate up to 250,000 gallons of water, or create an oil slick that spreads for two acres. Let’s see, if there are four quarts in a gallon, that means roughly 824 million quarts times 250,000 gallons of water is … my calculator can’t figure it out. Regardless, it wasn’t a very green thing for a green company like BP to do.

Advertise to survive

So, what did BP do after it accidentally wrecked the Gulf of Mexico? It cranked out some more ads, of course! BP was terrified of losing customers. In fact, in the first two months after the spill, company revenues dropped an estimated 18%. Desperate to pull out of this nosedive, BP took to the airwaves, spending roughly $93 million in advertising in the first four months after the disaster. That’s an average of $5 million a week.

Two years later, it committed to spending another $500 million in ads to repair its tarnished image. Apparently, it worked — BP never went out of business. In fact, later studies showed that the communities with the most exposure to BP’s earlier “Beyond Petroleum” campaign had the smallest losses after the disaster … the people there had somehow been inoculated by BP’s advertising.

It would seem all’s well that ends well. The company has fully bounced back with more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in revenue in 2022. The Gulf of Mexico, not so much. The disaster cost tens of thousands of lost jobs, billions in economic impact and caused lasting damage to US wetlands. That’s how it’s done, folks. That is some good corporate propaganda.

Public relations is just propaganda

The word propaganda obviously has a negative connotation in modern society because of its association with totalitarian regimes. But in truth, propaganda is a neutral concept that means “influence” rather than the manipulation of opinion in a particular direction. Writer Alain de Botton points out that the Catholic Church has been using propaganda techniques for hundreds of years, but we don’t think it’s a bad thing because they were propagating positive concepts like modesty, friendship and courage.

While it’s true that the word has fallen out of fashion, the process is still very much alive and actively shaping opinions every day. There’s no such thing as a “propaganda industry” today. It goes by a much nicer name today: public relations, or PR. Did you know there are roughly three PR professionals for every journalist working in the United States today? That’s 244,730 PR pros in 2019, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, versus around 88,000 journalists. Though some industry insiders put the ratio closer to 6:1. That’s up from roughly 1:1 as recently as 1995.

If you have any lingering doubts that propaganda and public relations are the same thing, consider the three most important characteristics of propaganda, according to communications professor Nancy Snow. First, propaganda is communication designed to intentionally change the opinions of a target audience. Second, the person communicating has something to gain by presenting their case to the audience. Third, there is usually a one-way flow of information from the person transmitting their message to those receiving it (unlike, say, education, which tends to be a two-way relationship between teacher and student). Propaganda and public relations have the same goals and job descriptions; ergo, they are the same thing.

Revenues in the American public relations industry were about $14 billion in 2008 alone. As American intellectual Noam Chomsky has said, corporations and the rich don’t spend billions on propaganda for the fun of it; they do it for a reason.

[Let’s Make Them Pay first published this piece.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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