Public health literature proposes that the Australian alcohol industry-funded organisation DrinkWise is a Social Aspects Public Relations Organisation (SAPRO) that favours industry over public interests by deploying ineffective alcohol harm reduction strategies. This research addresses a gap in the critical public relations literature by investigating these claims through an examination of DrinkWise\u27s source media content. Content and rhetorical framing analysis revealed how the organisation framed the alcohol issue, as well as identifying the messages and message audiences of their media releases. Results supported extant research suggesting that DrinkWise is insulating the alcohol industry against evidence-based public health harm reduction strategies, by engaging in agenda building through industry-friendly framing of the alcohol issue, and dissemination of information subsidies to elites and policy-makers. We discuss the conclusions through a lens of hegemony and develop an argument that DrinkWise media relations is a strategy to maintain a hegemonic individual responsibility ideology

Increased pressure on risk industries to reduce their negative impact on society has resulted in an increasing volume of "risk" and "responsibility" communications from interest groups known as Social Aspects Public Relations Organizations (SAPROs). SAPROs have been criticized for being the "front groups" of risk industries (e.g., the tobacco, gambling, sugar, and alcohol industries). Operating within the neoliberal policy framework, SAPROs seek to forestall regulation and prioritize industry profits over public health. Building on risk industry research from the public health sphere, this article examines the SAPRO phenomenon and situates it in the political public relations (PR) literature. Specifically, it considers how SAPROs perform an indirect lobbying function on behalf of their funding industries. Using DrinkWise as an example of an alcohol SAPRO, this article shows that SAPROs represent a novel development in front group strategy and examines how this development intersects with neoliberalism. This article also argues that SAPROs are deployed by risk industries to hegemonically promote the idea of personal responsibility and that their indirect lobbying function may be necessary to the continuance of neoliberal policies.