Honest journalist, slippery PRs?

The excitements, tensions and prejudices sparked by Julia Hobsbawm's Editorial Intelligence project, which attempts to bridge the gap between journalists and PRs, have been crystallized by inflammatory comments from Cristina Odone.

In her Guardian column Odone writes:

Journalists are in the business of exposing the truth, PRs are in the business of twisting it. Journalists want nothing more than to strip away the protective layers with which the powerful camouflage their objectives or their achievements; PRs are paid by the powerful to prevent precisely this. So no, there is no moral equivalence between journalism and PR.

Former R4 Today editor Rod Liddle said much the same in The Independent:

...I don't want PR to have anything to do with journalism. It is our job to discover the truth, and theirs is to disguise it.   

Some of the reaction from PR commentators can crudely be be characterised as "I know some decent journalists and some decent PRs, and I know bad on both sides, too."

While certainly true, this notion of examining the norms of a discipline by experience of its practitioners doesn't really get to the central issue.

Because journalists pride themselves on truth and accuracy, they place the sanctity of 'facts' as the faultline between the practices.

And the PR case is made more difficult when Max Clifford weighs in with quotes like this, from the same edition of Media Guardian as Odone's piece.

"We only want what is in the best interests of our clients, who pay us vast sums of money, and to achieve that we are deceitful, creative and economic with the truth, often hiding it."

'Respectable' PR has a speedy response, suggesting that Clifford isn't really a PR at all. This argument, one which I find hard to accept, often tries to find a legitimacy in the framings laid down by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.

Perhaps Clifford's ambivalence to 'truth' does put him beyond the pale, but even the most straight-backed PR can't dispute that PR does different things with truth than journalism.

For journalism, truth, or better, accuracy goes hand in hand with balance. A claim is made and it is tested by counter-claim.

So a journalist begins from the assumption that there are (at least) two sides to every story; a PR is paid to present just one side of the story, and present it is as persuasively as possible.

Odone, Liddle and others fall down when they fail to acknowledge that journalism then frames these accounts in line with (supposed) news values into a story (their word!) that is necessarily partial. You can say a glass is half full, you can say it is half empty. Both are equally 'true' or 'accurate', and the journalist must choose which to put first; this framing or sequencing may significantly affect the thrust of the account, but will not usually be regarded as twisting the truth...

Unless, of course, if this framing is made by a PR.

PR's problem is that it has serious difficulty in determining what does indeed constitute ethical practice.

For a lot of PRs, accuracy is just another factor in the wider field of reputation management: "It is important that we win a reputation for honesty and fair dealing."

For a lot of journalists, the desire for balance, for always promoting the counter argument, can lead to causes and ideas that are inherently unworthy of the attention, gaining far greater prominence in a 'balanced' or 'accurate' discourse than they would otherwise merit.    

Comments

[Simon Collister]

Great post, Philip.

Not sure I took it all in at a first reading... but my thoughts on the issue are broadly in agreement.

However, is it possible to presume 'truth' and 'accuracy' are the same thing?

Could you argue that both PROs and journos adhere to accuracy?PROs don't want to release lies or false statements (unless they work for Max C) any more than journos want to report them?

Truth, on the other hand, is perhaps shaped by context. A story's 'truth' is perhaps altered depending on the wider framework within which the PRO or journalist works.

So while a press release may be accurate to the PRO it may not contain the full 'truth' because the company's board may wish to keep certain 'facts' hidden.

Similarly, while a journo may want to write an accurate story absed on the 'facts' from both sides, this may not fit into the paper's editorial policy (cf. the Daily Mail, Sun etc) and so the story may not represent the full 'truth'.

Thoughts?

[Philip Young]

You are right, truth and accuracy can be very different. Here is an example I use in PR ethics lectures:

Tottenham Hotspur (yesterday) announced plans to raise £15m through a share offer (The Guardian, Dec 24, 2003). The club supported this with the following (wholly accurate) assertion:

Current performance
The Club is currently in 15th place in the Premier League, having won 5 and drawn 3 of the 17 league games played so far this season. The club … is still in the FA Cup, having been drawn to play Crystal Palace in the third round.

All true … but 3 wins + 5 draws in 17 games equals a less impressive 9 defeats.

And it was no surprise Spurs were still in the FA Cup - their first match was at least a week away...

[Tom O'Sullivan]

I've only been in the PR industry for about 2 years, but it does seem that many journalists have blind spots in seeing their own agendas. PR is, in some respects, a very honest industry because we represent a client and we are open about that fact.

Many journalists can twist a story or take a particular view, or sub-eds can place a mis-leading headline, which has more to do with pandering to the views of their readership rather than representing some greater truth about a story.