Government Public Relations: A Reader

Government Public Relations: A Reader. Edited by Mordecai Lee. London: CRC Press, LLC. 2007. 337 pp. ISBN 9781420062779 (paper).

Government public relations have a bad reputation. While government has a right and a duty to communicate its programs and policies to the public, how it does so is the subject of on-going examination in academia, in the media, among the public, and in government itself. Government Public Relations: A Reader contributes to this discussion with a series of accessible, updated readings.

Government public relations mean different things to different people. Media view PR as spin - a dark force they must guard against. The public equate it with self-serving publicity stunts, crass image-making and even outright deception. Public administrators loathe the term and try to distance their communication work from PR, which has become a pejorative.

To put it another way, government public relations are suffering from bad PR. Government Public Relations aims to change that. The editor, Mordecai Lee, argues that public relations are a legitimate way for government to communicate with the public, and that PR techniques should be included in the contemporary public administrator's toolbox, in much the same way as budgeting, human resources, strategic planning, and performance assessment are now. Lee worked in PR in both the government and the non-profit sectors and now teaches governmental affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He brings broad experience to this book and is its driving force. It is his voice we hear most clearly, in the introductions he wrote to all 25 chapters, and in the nine chapters he contributed. While the book claims to offer writings from international sources, only four are from outside the United States. I do not believe that this handicaps the book. After all, public relations are an American invention and it is appropriate that we hear from...