This morning I had my attention brought to a feature on the CBS News site entitled The Flak Over Flacks. Delivered by a legal analyst named Andrew Cohen, in the wake of the publication of his book (does one sniff an irony here already?!), the piece makes a hard hitting attack on the integrity of PR people with comments such as “show me a PR person who is ‘accurate’ and ‘truthful’ and I'll show you a PR person who is unemployed” and “PR people are trained to be slickly untruthful or half-truthful”. 

Somewhat incensed by what I read I spent sometime composing a response but, with 97 responses posted already including a letter from the PRSA, the site has disabled the publish function “to enable everyone an opportunity to comment” – err, but if I can’t publish my post I can’t comment…am I missing something?!  

So instead, at least for now, I am posting my response here: 

Andrew – you’re right, there is nothing funny about the revelations that Scott McClellan lied to the American people.  

But let us put this in perspective:  

1.) Every profession (sadly) contains bad practitioners that let the side down, and sometimes those bad practitioners are caught out, exposed and persecuted in such a way as to taint the reputation of their industry. Some professions (including journalism, PR and law), or groups of people (such as celebrities, sports people and royalty), come under rather more scrutiny and suffer even more polarised judgement than others because the ‘public’ upholds them as purveyors of ‘truth’ and models of ‘morality’.  What a breathtaking and precariously high place to sit, and not surprising then that so many fall. 

With specific regards to the PR profession: 

2.) There seems to be a general sense of misunderstanding in your piece as to what PR is and how it works. Like journalists, PRs are bound to a code of ethics and for the most part respect them.  As many of the people who have commented on your article have pointed out, to tell mistruths would only lose one the respect of colleagues, contacts and clients. It is, very simply, not the way to do ‘PR’ business. The skill honed in a PR person is delivering the truth, on behalf of your client, in the best possible way.   

3.) Don’t journalists have a role to play here too? In his book Flat Earth News, Nick Davies accuses newspapers of tamely accepting stories from public relations initiatives, an accusation backed up by Metrica Numbers, an annual PR industry benchmarking report, which suggests at the emergence of a ‘haste and paste’ publishing trend in today’s media. As Roy Greenslade, in a recent of his Evening Standard columns, conceded: “PR can hardly be blamed for taking advantage of journalists who are happy to be spoon-fed stories.”  

Of all mediums in the world it is the media, in my opinion, that best demonstrates the grey between black (lies) and white (truth) for it is an entity endlessly challenged by objectivity. The experiences of those both creating and consuming the media makes it near impossible for it to be anything but an averagely grey mass, and the sooner we accept that the sooner we can deal with it.