Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Distrusting the Press

Some of the happiest years of my youth, after college and the U.S. Army, were spent as a journalist. My first job was as a reporter for a weekly newspaper and, after the editor left to join a daily six months later I became the editor. That was my first insight into the quality of journalism in the late 1960s. Suffice to say I had no training in journalism beyond what I learned on the job.
What journalism didn’t do is provide a living wage even in those halcyon years and to borrow a phrase from Mae West, a 1930s sexpot, “Like Snow White, I drifted.” In my case it was a natural transition into public relations. What that taught me was that newspapers and other news media could not exist without PR practitioners.
We developed the stories and we fed them to editors and reporters. Very little of what one reads in the news media represents anything generated by individual journalists with the exception of sports, crime reports, and obituaries. What we did then and do now is not unlike the legion of “public information officers” for government agencies and those hired to keep politicians in the news and hopefully out of jail.
Though it may seem counterintuitive, the first thing one learns in PR is to tell the truth because anything else will inevitably come back to bite the client. There are, of course, exceptions. PR undertaken for environmental, consumer, and other advocacy groups skew the information they provide. The Greens and consumer groups thrive on creating scare campaigns.

Read more: http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/49772

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