Acknowledging the limitations of Public Relations’: The US Elections

In her blog ‘Will you vote with me?’, Bianka describes how women’s fashion magazine Cosmopolitan is pushing an online media campaign in the United States. Via social media (#cosmovote), the magazine aims to encourage young women to Get Out The Vote (GOTV) in the 2016 United States’ elections by framing voting as ‘sexy’ and using celebrity endorsers. I find it interesting that this medium is engaging in politics being an ‘unusual suspect’, but in my opinion the role of this Public Relations (PR) campaign should not be overrated. An alternative corporate communications campaign could have possibly served as a better example to explain the role of social media rather than this political one.

Because the number of young female voters that will end up voting, will not just depend on whether or not they have been exposed to Cosmopolitan’s social media campaign. It will for example also depend on the number of young voters that has been compelled that Hillary Clinton is indeed an interesting alternative to the often-preferred candidate Bernie Sanders. It will depend on the number of additional videos being leaked, exposing Trump’s sexism and having already costed him votes. It will depend on the performances of both candidates during the third debate. It will depend on the media analysis, interviews with experts, and replaying of highlights following those debates (Fridkin et.al., 2007) et cetera, et cetera.

In the end the magnitude of these elections and roles of traditional and social media in a country like the United States, create a very complicated situation that cannot be oversimplified. A sole focus on PR and social media just does not appear to cover the issues sufficiently, especially when scientific fields like political science and sociology can play such interesting explanatory roles. This complements van Gorp’s constructionist approach (2007) as following his line of argumentation, bringing in the element of American media culture could lead to some very interesting additional insights within 500 words. One could argue that part of that culture, is America’s biased media and the fact that a majority of its newspapers are currently endorsing Hillary Clinton might have a huge effect on the outcome of the elections.

Ivanka Trump about her father's childcare plan

That partisan media provides for interesting additional explanations of Cosmopolitan’s reasons for starting the GOTV social media campaign. It shows how this magazine too is partisan, because a higher number of young people getting out to vote is expected to increase Clinton’s chances of winning the elections. The support for Clinton was recently confirmed when Cosmopolitan’s interviewer Prachi Gupta confronted Trump’s daughter Ivanka with critical questions about her father’s statements regarding childcare and maternity leave. This could lead to interesting questions about non-traditional media getting involved in political discussions and possibly creating adverse affects, such as heigthening polarization and creating greater apathy (Lelkes, Sood and Iyengar, 2015). In conclusion, although the example raised is a very interesting one – because of the topic that it covers it probably would have been more interesting from a political communication’s point of view rather than the PR one.

  

Jeanette van Eijk studied Public Administration and International Public Policy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. She worked for several years as Public Affairs professional in The Hague and Brussels, and enrolled in the University of Amsterdam’s Corporate Communications Master programme in February 2016.