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.