Karen Miller Russell

Libbie Custer's "Last Stand": Image Restoration, the Press, and Public Memory

A review of 265 newspaper and magazine articles indicates that for decades Elizabeth Custer worked to restore the image of her husband, George Custer, following his controversial demise in 1876. These same activities simultaneously functioned as what scholars have identified as important ingredients for situating a person or event in public memory, particularly by connecting Custer to the “taming” of the West and the Civil War, preserving artifacts, and reminiscing about her husbands heroic qualities.

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.

United States–Development and Expansion of Public Relations

Twentieth-century US public relations historiography has focused primarily on corporate public relations and agencies, incorporating a “great man” perspective and largely excluding women and minorities. This scholarship allows us to begin to build a narrative, presented here, but the authors call for an expansion of what is considered public relations and of who practiced it. Public relations was often used by people in areas such as politics, churches, higher education institutions, and social service agencies who were not trying to invent public relations; rather they were solving problems by using communication to inform and persuade their audiences. The activism of suffragist and women’s rights advocate Alice Paul, and Henry Lee Moon, NAACP public relations director, illustrates that American public relations history is broad, diverse, and expansive.