30:26 "However ... symmetry does not describe 90percent of what those who call their work public relations do. Our field might be evolving slowly towards Excellence, in a dialectic kind of way, but successful practitioners are still practicing press agentry and publicity, and spin doctoring is the characteristic characterisation of our field in the media. You can get a full dose of this from another recent [1996] history, Stuart Ewen's PR! A Social History of Spin, an account many PR academics do not use but it should not be ignored because it is about that other 90pc....
31:50 "If we wanted our curriculums to match the practices reported by the media we should have to teach courses in spin doctoring, ghost writing, image making and propaganda. Such courses wouldn't be accepted by most of our univerities and probably not by the public relations profession either, which likes the mantle of academic respectability while it either delines to hire our graduates or gives them jobs doing publicity or press agentry.
"A more honest term for our field, frankly, would be communication management, or strategic communication, or persuasive communication, or simply persuasion, any of which would be a better characterisation of what happens in practice."
It strikes me that a good bit of historical thinking is what is required to knock the symmetrical spinners for six.
Posted by: Paul Seaman | September 03, 2011 at 01:30 PM