Trevor Cook points to fascinating interview with Hill & Knowlton chairman and CEO Paul Taaffe conducted by Wendy Carlisle for current affairs programme Background Briefing on Australia's Radio National prior to Taaffe speaking to the Australian Institute of Public Relations.
Here are some extracts from a transcript of the programme - well worth reading in its entirety:
Wendy Carlisle: One word PR people hate is ‘spin’, and they especially hate being called spin doctors. They think that makes them sounds dodgy and manipulative, and they say that’s not what they’re about.
Paul Taaffe: We are in the business of truth. Public relations is basically helping governments or companies or even NGOs say what they need to say and say it in the right way at the right time to the right people. And that is not about lies, that’s about telling the truth.
Wendy Carlisle: Sometimes companies don’t want to tell the truth though. One of the things you’re talking about tonight I gather is that there is nowhere to hide.
Paul Taaffe: There’s nowhere to hide, that’s absolutely right. Many companies are silly, but in Australia many companies believe that you communicate on a need to know basis, so you communicate when you’re in distress, or when you have to. The reality is, we live in the Google age, there are no secrets.
Wendy Carlisle: You really believe that?
Paul Taaffe: I really believe that. There are no secrets. There may be secrets for a day, but over time there are no secrets.
Wendy Carlisle: Google has changed things, but hitting the search key is no use if the information is not out there in the first place. You can’t Google ‘Hill and Knowlton to find out who they’re lobbying for in Australia. Unlike in the US, here there is no public register of their clients. And Paul Taaffe says the first spin doctors were not actually PR people, but the media.
Paul Taaffe: By the way, just a small point: the first person that coined spin was not the media on public relations agencies, it was public relations agencies on the media, because the media, particularly in political environments, and these were political PR people, accused the media of spinning facts or statements coming out of administration. So the first time I ever heard spinning was about 20 years ago in the UK elections when the media was being accused of spinning to a conservative agenda.
Paul Taaffe told Background Briefing that public trust has gone down the gurgler. We don’t trust politicians, we don’t trust the media, so just who should we trust to tell us the truth? He says the PR industry is here to help us.
Paul Taaffe: What I’m saying is, no authority figure is trusted. Now what communication professionals do is help you navigate that lack of trust, through that lack of trust. So nobody’s trusted, nobody trusts governments, nobody trusts large corporations and increasingly the media’s not trusted. So who do I trust? Well I trust nobody, I trust other people, I go on internet, I seek like-sided voices.
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