You can just imagine how many e-mails and telephone calls I’ve gotten in the wake of the recent unflattering and untruthful CBS “Sunday Morning” diatribe on the behavior and characteristics of public relations professionals – and coming from a lawyer, at that.
Usually, I see “Sunday Morning” – I’ve been a fan since Charles Kuralt was its first host. I’ve been no less a loyal viewer since Charles Osgood took over. But I happened to miss the Sunday installment that featured CBS’s legal news analyst though by now I know by heart the content of his ill-tempered statement.
Never unemployed and engaged in public relations all my working life, I calculated that, in the context of his commentary, I have been lying for more than 60 years -- maybe a qualification for the Guinness Record Book.
This inference neither troubles me personally nor do I believe it harms me professionally. But I am highly irritated about what it says about the thousands of corporate executives, government officials, NGO advocates, and, perhaps most significant of all, editors and reporters with whom I have worked and shared confidences for six decades – not to speak of the millions of people around the world who have been the recipients of information I have had a hand in crafting.
I submit they’re smarter than what the CBS commentary implies. I don’t believe those with whom I have worked to disseminate my clients’ messages are so gullible (or so dumbly obliging) to be parties to the communication of lies. On the contrary, I think editors and reporters have played an important role holding public relations professionals like me to acceptable standards of fact and decency. Nor do I believe the recipients of those messages are so easily manipulated.
The grey area – as with all manner of media – is not in reporting facts. Rather, it’s in how those facts are interpreted.
Increasingly, news media are in the business of interpretation and commentary, areas once confined to the editorial page. Many if not most newsmen forget that we in public relations are not surrogates of journalists or media. Rather, we are the paid advocates of clients who have a point of view that may be questioned by affected parties. Our interpretation in serving our clients may differ from how a reporter reacts to the same set of facts. But this is nothing new in the world of journalism; editorial writers frequently have differing points of view than those expressed in a publication’s news columns.
But three score years of working in this arena have convinced me that, after all is said and done, the public gets it right. Brand names like Coca-Cola, Frito-Lay, Rolls Royce, Tiffany, Lipton, McDonald’s, Nestle, Hormel, Kraft, Budweiser, Shell and a hundred others retain their high market shares year after year because they deliver on their promise. They participate in an election every day for the customer’s vote at a time when the success rate of newly introduced competitive products is in the very low single digits.
The fact is, an individual, an organization, a product gets only one chance to lie to the public. Even in a nation of 300 million, the public early on arrives at a collective opinion – and lying over even the short run simply doesn’t work in a democratic society.
The greater lesson from the CBS incident for those of us in public relations is that it reminds us that we have done a terrible job explaining what we do. What’s the logic of claiming ethical standards when most people – including many in public relations – are unable to define the term?
Our collective failing has been in not being more specific about what we do on behalf of our clients and employers under the rubric of public relations and, more recently, communications. And making known that public relations has existed from the time humans began interacting with one another and, knowingly or not has been practiced for millennia – all the while a neutral discipline that can be used for what’s good for society and, from time to time, what’s not so good.
Given the will, there’s plenty of time to fix it – and forget about CBS “Sunday Morning.”
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