At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States shifted to a consumer-oriented, industrial society that fostered the development of new products and services as people moved to cities to find work. During this transformation from farm to factory, advertising and PR emerged as professions. While advertising drew attention and customers to new products, PR partly began to help businesses fend off increased scrutiny from the muckraking journalists and emerging labor unions of the time.⁸

The first PR practitioners were simply theatrical press agents: those who sought to advance a client’s image through media exposure, primarily via stunts staged for newspapers. The advantages of these early PR techniques soon became obvious. For instance, press agents were used by people like Daniel Boone, who engineered various land-grab and real estate ventures, and Davy Crockett, who in addition to performing heroic exploits was also involved in the massacre of Native Americans. Such individuals often wanted press agents to repair and reshape their reputations as cherished frontier legends or as respectable candidates for public office.

Public Relations and Framing the Message