Activism and the Limits of Symmetry: The Public Relations Battle Between Colorado GASP and Philip Morris

Abstract

Litigation has forced tobacco companies like Philip Morris to disclose more than 7 million internal documents, including previously confidential public relations plans. We draw from this archive, as well as from activist materials, to demonstrate that, despite vigorous industry efforts to thwart them, activists in this case employed strategies of values advocacy and inoculation and capitalized on economic benefits to persuade publics. This watershed case poses continued challenges for the 2-way symmetrical or mixed-motive theoretical model of public relations. Accounting for public relations activism and understanding its voice in influencing contemporary public debate requires that scholars move beyond this widely accepted model that stresses compromise between activists and organizations. An alternative rhetorical theory of activist public relations is posited to account for groups that refuse to accommodate opponents.

The authors would like to thank the various reviewers, as well as colleagues Drs. Rachel L. Holloway, Alan R. Freitag, and Dean Kruckeberg for their assistance with this manuscript. They would also like to thank Pete Bialick, President of Colorado GASP, for access to the group's archives.

Notes

¹The Excellence Study and research program is funded by the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Research Foundation to examine excellence in public relations. Part of the Excellence Theory that emerged from this program of research builds from the original four models to stress creating relationships between organizations and their publics that are two-way and symmetrical.

²The Excellence Study update rebuts ongoing criticism of the models. The authors contend they never argued that symmetrical practices were completely altruistic; they dismiss contingent and mixed-motive critiques as merely elaborating on their original conceptualizations of the theory; they contend that the two-way symmetrical model is not idealistic. They also dismiss the concern over abuse of power in the model, arguing activists can have considerable power by professionally employing public relations skills.

³This research was partially supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute (R01-CA87490), “Linguistic Analyses of Tobacco Industry Documents.” The views expressed herein are solely those of the authors.

⁴Cutler (2004) argued that the process of theory development is being dominated by quantitative research such as that of Grunig's Excellence Study.

⁵The American Legacy Foundation's campaign, truth™, for example, persuades youth to reject tobacco by using values advocacy. Similar to GASP, truth™ focuses on the industry's dishonesty and social costs of tobacco, rather than on the dangers of smoking, to appeal to teens.

⁶Note, however, these commercials remain suspect for actually encouraging youth smoking under the pretense of preaching “adult choice.” See Landman, Ling, and Glantz (2002).