Public Relations Philosophy, Part 1

One of the most misaligned firms in the PR game is the military. Especially since Vietnam there has been a general distrust between the military, who toed the company line of all is well, while for the first time the war was being televised and clearly all was not well. The need for a shift in the way public relations were dealt with during that war was clearly a necessity that was not seen, prepared or implemented during the war, and there are clear indications that the Tet offensive, Launched during the Lunar New Year, was partly a public relations campaign on the part of the North Vietnamese to try to show both the South Vietnamese and the Americans that the Vietcong (N. Vietnam) had the will and the ability to continue to fight even up against superior fire power, and a better equipped, better trained, larger American military force. As a PR campaign it was highly successful, but the American response was not. There didn't seem to be a common message of hope and certainty. In fact, there seemed to be a message of chaos, which led the citizens of the United States to believe that the war was unwinnable.