Public relations helps achieve mutual adjustment between institutions and groups, establishing smoother relationships that benefit the public. Public relations can be a safety valve for freedom. By providing means of working out accommodations, it makes arbitrary action or coercion less likely. Public relations is an essential element in the communications system that enables individuals to be informed on many aspects of subjects that affect their lives. Public relations can help activate organization's social conscience.
Public relations is a universal activity.
Everyone practices principles of public relations in seeking acceptance, cooperation or affection of others. Public relations professionals only practice it in a more professional way. In the heyday of press agentry, its practitioners could get away with almost anything. At the same time, businesses operated secretly and often fraudulently, and newspapers engaged in muckraking. Employed to represent the anthracite coal industry in 1906, Lee declined to be merely the industry press agent.