Definitions of Sexuality Part 3

Before I leap into the body of this post or essay, I'd like to talk briefly about David Foster Wallace.

Wallace has been for a long time my favourite author; I have discussed him a little already in this blog in the early post "An Appreciation of David Foster Wallace". This was the first post in which I first mentioned my own 'mentally illness' and the first to bring up the taboo subject of sexuality. Since his suicide scholarship about Wallace has burgeoned dramatically but this does not mean everyone knows everything about him now. There is n aspect of the man which I suspect is probably often overlooked. Wallace believed that most everything everyone else believed was bullshit.

I don't have a copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men on hand but I can remember much of it more or less. The last story in the collection describes the attempted rape of a hippie chick by a violent nutter. The narrator of this story says something like, "Psychotics, as everyone knows, having issues with their mothers." The narrator of the story seems to believe this but did Wallace himself give any credence to this snippet of pop psychology? I don't think so – but he knew that very many people do. Wallace specialised in writing from the perspective of someone who knows a little of what passes for psychology today but is not quite smart or critical enough to know that most of it is bogus. As I discussed in my other post about Wallace, the narrator of "Good Ol' Neon" diagnoses his psychologist as a repressed homosexual. On what grounds does the narrator of this story make his 'diagnosis'? He decides that the psychologist is insecure about the size of his dick, is anxious that he doesn't "measure up". A kind of pop psychology idea circulates almost subliminally through the heterosexual community that homosexuals of both the latent and overt sort worry about their 'manhood' and the narrator of "Good Ol' Neon" obviously believes this. But did Wallace as well? I don't think so.

I suspect that Wallace knew that if he wrote about the world as it really is, people wouldn't believe him. Wallace really, really wanted people to like him. And if he told the truth as he saw it, people would dislike him and perhaps even think he was crazy. So Wallace opted for writing literature rather than philosophy, a choice that enabled him to talk through others, to express and conceal himself at the same time, to have it both ways.

I can identify with Wallace's predicament. I have opined in this blog that the massive increase and decrease in crime during the twentieth century was causally related to lead poisoning, an idea John Oliver has also expressed on his show – but few people seem to want to even countenance this possibility. Should I renounce this position and say, as everyone else on the Left seems to say, that the cause of crime is simply poverty? Unfortunately I can't bring myself to do this. Yes, poverty plays a role in pushing people towards crime but, by itself, it is not an adequate explanation for the crime waves of the late 'eighties and early 'nineties.

In this blog I have tried to define sexuality in different ways. I have talked about it in terms of experiences and in terms of love. I have claimed that Kurt Cobain defined it in terms of sexual arousal. It may seem that I have been skirting the issue however, because I have never addressed the psychiatric definition of homosexuality. In early 2014, in the short period between being bullied into going into respite and being put under the Mental Health Act, I saw a psychiatrist once, one that I had briefly seen when I first entered the service and had never seen again and would never see again. She took a risk no other psychiatrist had by stating the psychiatric definition. She defined homosexuality as a sexual attraction toward members of the same sex. When she told me this, I literally felt like something evil had looked at me out of her eyes. Partly this is because she was telling me something that I already knew, as if I was stupid. And partly because I think this definition is evil.

Consider, first, what is meant by the term 'sexual attraction'? The expression is slippery. Is it simply the ability to recognise that another person is good-looking? If a man is aware that another man is attractive does that automatically make him homosexual? Leading Hollywood actors, like Brad Pitt, Colin Farrell and Ryan Gosling appeal to men as well as women and this is partly because these actors are handsome. In Austin Powers Mrs Kensington says of Austin, 'Women want him, and men want to be him', variants of this phrase having been around since at least the 'fifties and which were often associated with James Bond. We have to draw a distinction between identification and attraction. Nevertheless the concept of 'sexual attraction' is hard to define and so almost useless.

In 2011, the real Jess told me a story about a patient she had known who, for a period when he was unwell, thought he might be gay. When his episode passed, this feeling that he might be gay went away. This suggests that what we think of as homosexuality can be transient. The question is: why did this young man feel he might be gay? Did he hear voices telling him he was gay? Did he form the paranoid conviction that others around him thought he was gay? Or did he go through a phase during which he worried that he was sexually attracted to men? Unfortunately I don't know what it was like for him. Men who temporarily worry about their sexuality seldom explain what the feeling was like.

Around 2013 or 2014, I started to worry that I might start being sexually attracted to men. My first hint of this psychotic symptom occurred in 2013: I was at WINZ and when talking to the youngish man behind the desk heard a voice in my head that said, "Nice eyes". In 2013 or 2014 I had become terribly afraid that I might turn gay and this fear subsequently affected my interactions with all men.

I need to make some important remarks about this 'attraction'. First, it didn't start until 2013 or 2014, when I was thirty-three or thirty-four, six years after I had first become a patient of the Mental Health System. Second, I found it incredibly unpleasant. Third, because I had been ill in 2007 and 2009 and been well for two years, during which time I'd reflected upon my illness and done some study into schizophrenia, I knew that this 'attraction' was a psychotic symptom that would pass given enough time or if I did or said the right thing. I knew furthermore that it came from the outside; this 'symptom' never affected my core sense of who I was And it has passed, now, finally, although it took three years for it to vanish completely.

I ought also say that I have always been strongly attracted to women and, during this period, continued to be attracted them.

The horrible thing is that, during this long period when I experienced this distressing psychotic symptom, it was impossible to talk about. For obvious reasons. For one thing it would have been misinterpreted as a trait I'd always had, which would have been false. Towards the end of my 'treatment' with the psychologist Simon Judkins in 2014 he asked me something like, "Aren't you attracted to men?" I can't remember his exact words but it was a leading question, a question to be answered only with a 'yes' or 'no'. It was another double bind. I gave no answer at all. What could I have said? Either way I was screwed. But I wasn't going to give the Mental Health Service the satisfaction of confirming their diagnosis when they themselves were the cause of my illness.

As readers of my blog will know (and I hope not all of my posts have been atrociously written) I hated Judkins. In this blog I have suggested that the event during childhood that made me vulnerable to psychosis was my parents' divorce when I was seven; I spelled this out in a fucking essay I had given my psychiatrist in 2014 shortly after I was put under the Act. Did Judkins even bring up the issue of my parents' divorce? Not once. Perhaps he got his psychology degree from the bottom of a box of breakfast cereal. I half suspect, although I have no evidence, that the only reason he got a job at the Taylor Centre was that Tony Fernando had a hand hiring him.

In the previous post I discussed sociopaths a little. Don't mistake me, there are very many good people who work in the Mental Health Service but there are also many arseholes who get into psychiatry and psychology because they want to know how others tick and enjoy having power over damaged people, victims of circumstance. Sociopaths are very different from schizophrenics: a sociopath has no soul, a schizophrenic has too much. Deep down a sociopath has no core self. He doesn't know if he's gay or straight, doesn't even deep down know if he's a man or a woman. The term for this is 'sociopathic inadequacy'. I have been treated by two sociopaths, a psychiatrist and a psychologist and both made me worse rather than better. I might make another remark which may be relevant. I read many years ago that sometimes sociopaths will say, in effect falsely, that they're gay, if they think it can win them sympathy and help them manipulate others better. Despite what many on the Left think, not all openly gay people are good.

I'll finish this post by saying one last thing. In the previous post I described the double-bind the Mental Health Service put me in. In the end, it was not just a choice between Bruce Springsteen and Faith No More, it was also a choice between Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, between "Born This Way" and "I Kissed A Girl". Back in 2007 and 2009, when I was most ill both options were bad, both represented positions I couldn't espouse. But in the end I had to pick one anyway. And so I opted for Katy Perry.

Schizophrenia and the Theory of the Double-Bind

There is a great deal of misunderstanding around schizophrenia. The word itself literally means "split-mind" and people have historically confused schizophrenia with multiple personality disorder. Readers can look up definitions of schizophrenia on the Internet but, bear in mind, most are bullshit. For instance, schizophrenics are supposed not to be able to think clearly, to lack verbal fluency and to have difficulties with abstract thinking, but I certainly hope readers of my blog feel that this view doesn't hold true of me. In today's post I am going to try to give some idea of what schizophrenia is, what its cause is or at least what I think it is, at least as it applies to me.

In a way, the term split-mind is not inappropriate. I sincerely believe that every person has two selves – the self as the person sees himself and the self that others see. Neither self is unitary. I change day to day and the self another sees varies depending on who that other is. Schizophrenia often (I shouldn't say always because I'm sure there are exceptions) involves a mismatch between others' perceptions of the subject and the subject's perception of himself. The schizophrenic totalises the Other, says to himself "They are all out to get me." This is of course the definition of paranoia. I think of the moment in Watchmen when Night Owl asks Rorschach, "Don't you think you're being a little paranoid?" and Rorschach replies,  "Paranoid? Is that what They're saying about me now?" The disjunction between the self as it knows itself and the self as it is known by others can take a drastic form, can lead to a complete split. In an earlier post I mentioned Yves, a man somewhat older than me who was treated by the same psychiatrist as me, Tony Fernando, and finally escaped of the system by, in his own words, "telling the psychologist what the psychologist wanted to hear". Yves is still schizophrenic, still very unwell. Last year I talked to him and he said to me "Have you considered cultivating a persona?" – something he obviously felt he had done himself. Yves is an extreme case but this mismatch between self and 'persona' is not uncommon. When I first became unwell, at the Big House, I believed briefly that I had multiple personality disorder. It was the only way I could make sense of the mismatch between my knowledge of myself and my sense of others' perceptions of me.

A person's sense of who he or she is is influenced by what other's think of him or her. Michel Foucault, someone who knew something about madness, argued that discourses create the objects they talk about. It is through discourse that the subject as it known to others becomes manifest. We might go a bit further and say "Bullshit discourses fuck people up". A couple of decades ago, the dominant theory of schizophrenia was that it was caused by a 'schizophrenogenic mother' – a mother who doesn't love her child. I think this theory is wrong or often wrong. I have only met one schizophrenic who expressed ambivalence about her mother and that was Jess, and I now think her ambivalence was simply the ambivalence all young women feel towards the mothers. But imagine a situation in which this theory holds sway among Mental Health professionals as it once did. Over time, the patient comes to blame his mother for his condition and his mother, feeling unfairly blamed by him and by others and feeling consequently angry or ashamed, will take it out on her child. In other words, the theory of the 'schizophrenogenic mother' may well have ruined the most important relationship in the lives of many young men and women, may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy. In early 2014 I was in a respite facility and I met an older schizophrenic, a man in his fifties or sixties who had probably been institutionalised when he was younger and had probably been treated during the heyday of this theory; over dinner one night he bluntly said that during a psychotic episode once he'd considered chopping up his mother with an axe. It scared the shit out of me and the next night I ran away from the respite facility back to my mother's house and didn't go back. I had only been at that respite facility two or three days. I'm sure that this man had been messed up by the discourse around schizophrenia current when he was younger.

This is not to say that all theories of schizophrenia are bullshit. One that may apply to me is the theory of the double-bind; I don't know that this is the root cause of my illness but it strongly featured in it. The double-bind theory of schizophrenia posits that schizophrenics are put in a situation where they must choose between two alternatives, both of which are bad. Naturally the schizophrenic is trapped, unable to make up his mind, driven mad by equally bad alternatives. I have hinted that this was the situation I was in in the post "Faith No More vs. Bruce Springsteen". I felt that the Mental Health Service had put me in a situation where I was being forced to choose between being a closet homosexual or coming out as gay. Both options were bad. I hated closet homosexuals – but I couldn't come out as gay because I'm not. This double bind didn't predate my illness. I'd been put in it by the Mental Health System because, for some reason, the people who were treating me refused to simply accept that I was straight.

The double-bind I was in follows naturally from attitudes prevalent among people generally nowadays and the Left in particular. It may also follow from whatever voguish theory of schizophrenia is fashionable among psychiatrists at the moment.. As readers will know, I am quite liberal but on one issue I now believe the Left is wrong. The Left believes that closet homosexuals are all bad, reprehensible, that openly gay men and women are good, honest, and that all gay people should come out. This is what I believed when I first became sick. It is a political position founded on an essentialist notion of sexuality. For instance, at the very end of 2014 I read an article in the Sunday Star Times, I think, in which a famous sportsman came out as gay; the article hailed him as "a hero" who would be a role model "for other young men struggling with the sexuality." This is typical of contemporary discourse about sexuality. As readers of my blog know, I do not regard sexuality as fixed any more. I think now that straight men can turn gay. It is a terrible thing to say I know but I believe it to be true.

For years, from the beginning of 2010 until the beginning of 2013, I dealt with the double-bind I was in by steering a course between the horns of the dilemma, by pushing it away rather than facing it. I was well then. I never kept a secret from anyone that I was straight but I didn't force the issue and pretty much allowed people around me to believe whatever they wanted. The film I wrote in 2012, "The Hounds of Heaven", was my way of publicly coming out as straight – because it was written about a woman I loved. It may not have gone down well. In early 2013 I became sick again, I think perhaps, and I speculate here, possibly because of public reaction my film. It became impossible then to avoid the double-bind any longer and I have suffered from severe anguish ever since. I had to make a choice. And the only choice I could make was to side with the closet homosexuals. This blog has been an inventory of people thought to be gay who have never come out – John Nash, John Ashbery, Lou Reed, Mike Patton, Virginia Woolf, Morrissey, Tom Cruise... And of course Kurt Cobain. There are others I could mention like Cliff Richard and David Bowie. The point, of course, is that just because a perception gets into circulation that someone is gay doesn't make it true.

It might seem as though I am dismantling the whole notion of 'closet homosexual' but I'm not. The question becomes, "How does one define the term 'closet homosexual'"? One way would be to say that a closet homosexual is a man who deliberately trawls for homosexual encounters by clandestinely visiting public bathrooms and disreputable parks to pick up men. This is the way people thought of homosexuality for much of the twentieth century– before it was legalised. I honestly don't believe this type of demi-monde exists anymore, that the world has changed. Furthermore I don't think this perception applies to the people I have listed above. But psychiatrists haven't realised that the world has changed.  A couple of weeks ago I heard Jess in my head. She said, "Is it illegal for two consenting adults to have sex?" Of course the answer is 'no'. But psychiatrists still seem to think it is and often assume that patients have secrets to hide.

I have had two homosexual experiences in my life. Once, when I was twenty-two, a man got in my face. And once, when I was thirty, I had a delusion or hallucination about someone, an experience I have been unable to describe fully in this blog and that I repressed for four years. When I did remember it, in early 2014, it caused me profound distress for a long time after. I didn't want either experience. The perverse irony, though, is that these experiences, and the fact that I have talked about them, prove that I'm straight. If I'd never had a homosexual experience and told the psychiatrists this, they would have continued not to believe me, continued to think I was lying. When trying to prove one's heterosexuality, the other side of the coin is heterosexual experiences – but why should I have to talk about those? I believe sex is sacred; sex and love go together. To say that I had had two long term relationships with girls, one lasting four years and the other lasting around five should have been enough.

I would never have been trapped in this double bind if it wasn't for the Mental Health System. It was the Mental Health System that put me in it. I remember my first or second appointment with my first psychiatrist Tony Fernando. He leaned towards me and with an insincere shit-eating smile told me that he had a sister who was schizophrenic. I wish to make two points about this. First, it is grossly unethical to effectively diagnose a patient schizophrenic on the first or second appointment as he had implicitly done. Second, is it not reasonable to wonder that the reason his sister was schizophrenic was because of him? Perhaps he had driven her mad when she was young. Perhaps the reason he got into psychiatry was because he got a thrill from sadistically messing with people's minds as he had conceivably done with his sister. My New Zealand readers may doubt the allegation that Fernando might be a sociopath; he had a high public profile. I remember he would sometimes feature in the newspaper, often talking about "teaching doctors compassion". But, lest we forget, Rolf Harris fronted a campaign raising awareness of childhood sexual abuse even as he was serially molesting young women. It is what sociopaths do. For them life is a game. How much can I get away with without being caught?

I might finish by talking about the difference between sociopaths and schizophrenics, psychiatrists and patients. I like schizophrenics but I detest psychiatrists. The schizophrenic wants to bring the two sides of identity together, his public and private self; the sociopath wants to keep his public and private life separate. The schizophrenic, for all his delusions, is concerned with the truth, with integrity; the sociopath doesn't give a shit about the truth and basically lacks a moral core. This is perhaps the fundamental problem  with the Mental Health Service. It is a war to the death between sufferers and sadists.

Journalism and PR

I thought I would include another essay I wrote for the degree I am studying. The subject is the relationship between journalism and PR.

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Journalism and Public Relations have a highly contentious relationship. Each profession views the other negatively: journalists denigrate ‘spin doctors’ and ‘flacks’ while PR practitioners similarly disparage journalists as ‘hacks’ engaged in ‘churnalism’. Mutual distrust and avowed antagonism diverts attention from just how close the relationship between ‘the press’ (by which I include also television, radio and internet news) and communication strategists is today and has been for some time. Journalists tend to deny the extent that PR informs the articles and items they write. Journalists see their role as a noble calling, view themselves as comprising a ‘fourth estate’, championing truth, speaking truth to power and servicing democracy by informing citizenry of truths they need to know; PR by contrast is viewed as mendacious, manipulative, frequently unethical, in the service of special interests and as verging on governmental and corporate propaganda. Consequently, journalists seek to rationalise their reliance on PR in various ways, as shall be shown in this essay. The distinction between PR and journalism has eroded further with advent of the digital age. Perhaps what is needed, as shall also be argued, is greater transparency in the media and an empowerment of marginal and disenfranchised groups by providing such groups access to PR services.

PR and journalism are in some ways alike. Both PR and journalism operate within what Habermas calls the “public sphere” (Habermas, 1989). The public sphere can be likened to a coffee house in which members of the public gather to discuss issues of common concern. Both PR practitioners and journalists engage in communication, conversation, with the public, or with publics, although with different motives. Journalists tend to engage in what Habermas calls communicative action. Communicative action is “designed to achieve understanding in a group and to promote consensus and cooperation” (Macnamara, 2014, p.140). Journalists often characterise their role within society from a High Modernist perspective, as crusaders fighting corruption and falsehood in the name of indignant objectivity. As Lord Northcliffe said, “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising”; journalists see their role as inherently adversarial. This Messianic self-image however is compromised in two ways. First, journalists have a duty not only to the truth but to the profitability of the media organisations for which they work. They need to sell newspapers and magazines, maximise and maintain ratings and attract advertisers by finding and composing stories very rapidly. Second, there is inevitably a subjective dimension to news production because journalists must not only report facts accurately but select which stories to cover and which facts to report; they must decide what should be important to their readers. The choice of which issues to cover is known as agenda setting, the choice of which aspects of an issue to highlight is known as framing and the implying of broader context is known as priming. Decisions with respect to agenda setting, framing and priming are made by journalists and editorial staff but are influenced by publics, governmental and corporate bodies – and of course PR. For example, recent articles in the New Zealand Herald concern water purity in rivers, which the newspaper has deemed a salient political issue. This shows the news media attempting to fulfil its civic responsibility. More recently, a number of articles have reported the fact that Bill English puts canned spaghetti on his home-cooked pizzas, an issue that blew up overseas before becoming newsworthy here. This coverage has all the hallmarks of a National Party PR campaign.

If journalism is communicative action, PR is what Habermas calls strategic action. Strategic action is “designed solely or primarily to achieve one’s own goals and focusses primarily on persuasion” (Macnamara, p. 140). PR practitioners seek to present the organisations they work for in the best possible light, and generate publicity that complements advertising activities. Although it is common to think of PR only in terms of its relationship to media, PR encompasses many other activities, including intra-organisation functions. PR practitioners have a foot in both camps – they not only represent their organisations to publics, they also represent publics to their organisations, and PR specialists can and often do recommend organisational changes. According to Grunig and Hunt, four different models of PR can be distinguished: first press agentry/publicity typified by exaggeration, stunts and hyperbole (the type of PR that gives all PR a bad name), secondly public information in which the practitioner disseminates truthful facts and can be considered a type of in-house journalist, thirdly two-way asymmetrical PR and fourthly two-way symmetrical PR. The third model is the most common today and involves PR practitioners gathering data on the public to facilitate “scientific persuasion” (Macnamara, p. 65). The last model involves a balanced co-involvement of public and organisation: it is considered normative, ideal, and is exemplified very rarely in the real world.

PR practitioners reach out to journalists to help publicise their organisations, and make themselves available to journalists when issues relevant to their organisations draw media attention. Nevertheless journalists view PR practitioners very derogatorily. Terms used by journalists for PR and PR practitioners include “spin”, “fabricators”, “flacks”, “fakers and phonies”, “hype” and “liars”. The negative perception among journalists (and the broader population) of PR is founded partly on true stories of manipulation, stonewalling, obfuscation and outright deception that circulate privately and publicly. It also arises from the journalistic self-image as a righteous crusader for truth which contrasts with the image of the PR practitioner as someone whose job entails concealing or distorting the truth. For their part, PR agents retaliate by describing journalists as “hacks” engaged in “churnalism”. It is worth noting however, as Macnamara points out, that many real world PR practitioners regard a free and fair objective news media as a social good, necessary to democracy, and so the perception of all PR workers as duplicitous con-artists is far from universally true.

Considering the negative stereotype of PR among journalists, the extent to which journalists make use of PR materials and sources must be seen as problematic. This contradiction between avowed practice and actual practice verges on hypocrisy; it has been called the “dirty secret of journalism”. Macnamara cites multiple studies which show just how much journalists rely on promotional information, summarising these findings in the following way. “Extensive data from quantitative studies conducted over the past 100 years show that somewhere between 30 and 80 per cent of media content is sourced from or significantly influenced by PR, with estimates of 50-80 per cent common.” (p. 127) How has this situation arisen? Journalists face tight deadlines: they must find, research and write stories in short time periods. It is easiest often to grab a press release from one’s inbox, either simply rewrite it lightly or seek out a single opposing view in the belief this will provide ‘balance’. It has arisen as a result of a combination of time constraints and laziness. Journalists often blame their reliance on PR material today on the crisis in journalism, the decline in mainstream media news with its concomitant loss of jobs and increased pressure on remaining staff, but as Macnamara argues persuasively the influence of PR in journalism is no recent phenomenon but has been a feature of journalism for more than a century.

The disjunction between journalistic attitudes to PR and their actual use of PR must create cognitive dissonance. How do journalists rationalise their dependence on PR? Macnamara cites a number of strategies which journalists employ to publicly distance themselves from PR, in this way bolstering the myths of journalist as heroic warrior for the truth and PR practitioner as dissembling devil. The first is denialism, journalists simply repudiating any relationship with PR. The second is the discourse of ‘spin’. By applying a pejorative label that “masks diversity, ambiguity, and even contradiction and presents a falsely coherent unified view of PR” (Macnamara, p. 13), a journalist can reject, eject, exclude PR from his or her sense of self and role. The third is the discourse of victimhood: the journalist is someone helplessly overwhelmed by a flood of PR generated misinformation. This strategy downplays journalistic agency and trivialises journalistic complicity in propagating PR. The final strategy is the doctrine of selective depravity. Macnamara presents this doctrine in the context of PR practitioners (“Some PR people are dishonest but most are not”) but it can equally apply to journalists: a journalist can say, “Some hacks make use of PR but I don’t.”

In day to day practice, journalists find other ways to rationalise the pervasive influence PR has on the profession. Despite the public narrative of Good vs. Evil, Truth vs. Lies, ‘hacks’ vs ‘flacks’, many real journalists conceptualise the relationship in a more practical way. “Most journalists and  PR practitioners agreed that each has a job to do and that, even though their roles interrelate, the jobs are different.” (Macnamara, p. 172) Journalists and PR people can even often be friends. A strategy journalists adopt to mitigate cognitive dissonance in real world practice is to mentally reclassify the PR practitioners with whom they have professional relationships as ‘experts’. ‘good contacts’ or ‘trusted sources’. Information that from one perspective would be viewed as Public Relations can be reimagined as objective testimony. The term ‘spin’ can be reserved for PR that is false, overblown or obfuscatory; the rest is not spin at all.

In the digital age, PR has an even greater influence on journalism. In Dirty Politics (Hager, 2014), investigative reporter Nicky Hager claims that right-wing blogger Cameron Slater was being paid by the National Party to attack National Party opponents. If this is true, Slater can be considered an unofficial PR practitioner, but one who was keeping his paid political allegiance secret and presenting his opinions as a kind of citizen journalism. Slater’s posts were often picked up by the mainstream media, an example being when Bevan Chang revealed in Whaleoil an affair with then Auckland mayor Len Brown. A second example that shows the blurring of the line between PR and journalism in the digital age is Donald Trump’s tweets. For example, Trump tweeted on 4th March this year that he had just found out that outgoing President Barack Obama had wire-tapped Trump Tower. This was widely regarded as a false allegation but was still widely reported by media. Some journalists have proposed that Trump was seeking to divert attention away from allegations that his newly appointed attorney-general Jeff Sessions had contact with Russian officials. Unscrupulous governments may also take advantage of social media to spread false information. For example recently reports spread that the sarin gas attack in Syria had been carried out not by the Assad regime (as the Pentagon and all reputable news networks had reported) but by ISIL. This story originated with the Kremlin-run news network RT. Many observers have argued that the US Presidential elections were swayed in Trump’s favour through the dissemination of fake news, authored by Russian sources, through Facebook.

The issue of journalistic hypocrisy with respect to the use of PR is troubling. Denial is not the solution. Even as journalism is declining, the number of PR practitioners is increasing massively. One partial solution is for journalists to take a lesson from academia (and Wikipedia) and cite their sources, an approach that would afford much greater transparency. The myth of total journalistic independence is false and ultimately deleterious and would be better abandoned.

Another partial solution is to embrace PR, to make it even more available. Yes, PR definitely has a dark side. Setting aside the issue of deliberate misinformation, obfuscation and distraction, there is the issue of systemic bias – PR overwhelmingly serves the interests of governments and monied elites. An obvious example is the pharmaceutical industry. As John Oliver has pointed out (see Last Week Tonight: Opioids, 2016), the opioid epidemic ravaging the United States can be partly attributed to Big Pharma having marketed morphine-derived painkillers to the public (and to doctors) as non-addictive. Democracy would be better served if PR agencies also represented underdogs, such as the victims of Big Pharma – if representation were made available to opioid addicts, former addicts and responsible clinicians as well as pharmaceutical companies, this issue might receive fairer media attention. Civil debate requires diverse publics to coalesce, mobilise and seek articulate voices. Not only would making PR more available to subaltern groups serve democracy by improving the quality of debate about issues, it would help journalists by providing them with a greater range of sources. The only way we can imagine this world arising however is through charities or governmental subsidies.

PR is here to stay. We live in an ever changing world, with journalism currently declining, PR expanding and new media continually appearing and reforming our conceptual landscape. It seems the wrong approach to pretend PR does not exist or that journalists don’t use it. Journalists are avowedly committed to the truth and they should face up to the truth of their own use of PR.



References

Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere (T. Burger, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Polity
Hagar, N. (2014). Dirty Politics. New Zealand: Craig Potton Publishing
Macnamara, J. (2014). Journalism & PR. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.
Oliver, J. (Oct 23. 2016). Last Week Tonight: Opiods. [Television Program]. US: HBO.