Media Standards Trust

When journalists and PR figures start questioning one another’s integrity you know things are going to get fiery. And this week's debate - hosted jointly by the Media Standards Trust and Westminster University - did not disappoint.

FOR: 59
AGAINST: 164
ABSTAINED: 80 (approx)

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The first sparks were thrown by Roy Greenslade, who, having rattled off the number of journalists killed, injured or jailed since the beginning of 2008 then asked “How many PR’s have been killed in the line of duty?” Journalists, Greenslade argued, “try their best to tell the truth” – unlike PRs. Although he had not personally, he said, been lied to by people in PR, he had been blocked from finding the truth. He had also been distracted, diverted and generally manipulated.

 

This all used to be manageable, he and Davies agreed, in the days when journalists had the time and space to find their own stories and sources, and challenge PR versions of the news. But journalism has been “robbed of its resources” such that it is now much more vulnerable to manipulation by vested interests. “We’re witnessing an imbalance between the seekers after truth and the gatekeepers to truth” Greenslade said. The gatekeepers have, in the last decade, increased their numbers and resources enormously. While at the same time, news organisations have cut bureaux, cut journalists and grown output.

 

Phil Hall, ex editor of the News of the World and now head of Phil Hall Associates (PR), did not disagree that journalism was in trouble. But, he argued, this was the fault of the “management consultants that [now] pass for proprietors” not the public relations industry. It is the owners’ fixation with their share price and shareholders that has led to the decline of standards in journalism, and an “ever-increasing cynicism from the media”, Hall claimed. As standards decline and newspapers rely more and more on ‘fliers’ – reports based on single sources or rumours – PR has had to step in to protect people’s reputations and prevent wild inaccuracies. “We are the antidote to the journalistic flier” Hall said.

 

Lord (Tim) Bell, the chairman of Chime Communications, took Hall’s argument still further. “The integrity of public relations”, Bell said, “is being threatened by the lack of resources in the press”. This was only one of Bell’s tidy inversions. “The growth of PR has made the press more honest [not less]”, he claimed. And yes, PR conceals, but it “openly conceals”. “We openly admit our bias”, Bell confessed, unlike journalists who conceal theirs. The PR advocate is working on behalf of his/her client, and will do that as honestly and as straightforwardly as s/he can.

 

And, as the panellists said in their round-ups, this was the real difference between the PR and the journalist. The former represents a client’s private interests to the best of their ability. The latter, when they’re doing their job, represents the public interest. The problem is that this is exactly what many journalists aren’t doing (or aren’t able to do).

 

Yet the audience was not in sympathetic mood. Journalists should take responsibility for their own faults, not seek to blame PRs. So Davies and Greenslade lost their motion, by 164 votes to 59. PR did, in the end, do good PR.