Cayce Myers

Open genre, new possibilities: democratizing history via social media

This article explores social media as a new genre within the history of the twenty-first century. An overview of genres role within democratizing history is discussed. The authors argue the social media serves a new form of rhetorical action genre within the twenty-first century. The authors conclude that the genre of social media presents a new (post) modern genre within twenty-first century historiography.

Early US Corporate Public Relations: Understanding the “Publicity Agent” in American Corporate Communications, 1902–1918

The publicity agent in the United States during the early twentieth century served as a transitional profession between the nineteenth-century press agent and the post–World War I public relations practitioner. This article examines the corporate roots of publicity agents, their split from the advertising industry, and their role in grassroots organizations. It shows that publicity agents and publicity men participated in a stand-alone, salaried profession with professional associations and standards. More importantly for public relations history, the rise of the publicity agent shows the initial connection and eventual split between advertising and public relations that was previously ignored in public relations historiography.

Social Media as Primary Source

This article explores and critiques the use of social media as a primary source in the writing of twenty-first-century history. Since the introduction of so-called social media in the early 2000s, social scientists, journalists, and users have hailed this media form as a revolutionary departure from the ‘old media’ that dominated the twentieth century. Part of the narrative of ‘new media’ is it provides greater amounts of user agency, removes structural impediments for social dialog, and promotes an egalitarian exchange within the global sphere. This article suggests that this account is a product of the narrative structure of classical liberalism, through which social media as an object of knowledge and effectivity is produced. It concludes that the use of social media as a primary source for social histories of popular protest will require substantive theoretical scrutiny by scholars writing about these processes of the twenty-first century.

Image repair in the aftermath of inaccurate polling: How the news media responded to getting it wrong in 1948 and 2016

The US presidential elections of 1948 and 2016 produced surprise outcomes when the predicted winners ended up losing the election. Using image repair theory, this article explains the strategies the media used to repair their image in light of predicting the wrong winner. Using a qualitative analysis of news coverage that immediately followed the 1948 and 2016 presidential elections, this study finds that the media utilized similar image repair strategies of offering explanations for poor information, highlighting the media’s good reporting, diminishing the harm caused by the inaccurate predictions, and justifying the inaccurate predictions of both elections. However, the media responses in 1948 and 2016 differed greatly in tone and in the utilization of a new attack strategy to deflect criticism of the media itself. These strategies suggest that media use of image restoration is limited because of the unique societal expectations placed on the press, and that the media’s inaccurate 2016 predictions and subsequent attack strategies may have been contributed to the heightened criticism of mainstream news.

Campaign Finance and Its Impact in the 2016 Presidential Campaign

This chapter explores the campaign finance issues in the 2016 presidential election. Because understanding campaign finance requires a grasp of federal election laws, this chapter provides a brief and understandable overview of campaign finance laws. Next, this chapter discusses the campaign expenditures and impact the hotly contested presidential primaries had for the general election campaign. This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the campaign fundraising and expenditures of the Clinton and Trump campaigns as well as joint fundraising committees and super-political action committees, and concludes with analysis of why Donald Trump lost the money contest, but won the presidential election in 2016.

United States Antecedents and Proto-PR

This chapter examines the use of the term “public relations” in the popular press from 1774 to 1899. Frequently public relations history places the beginnings of PR in the late nineteenth century with a genesis in entertainment and later business. This examination of the use of the term “public relations” shows that public relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was related to politics, specifically international affairs, domestic relations, and political popularity.