The sleaze and (rare) virtues of Public Relations and Communications

I just noticed something on LinkedIn, a site which has risen to a “necessary” monopolistic evil on the level of Facebook and YouTube. It’s about PR and journalism. And it’s awful.

Of course, I’m on LinkedIn. You’re on LinkedIn. I’ve seen job applications where it’s mandatory now for you to provide a LinkedIn profile. This is no doubt why so many postings or casual comments are so excruciatingly anemic. People must be terrified of sharing a sincere viewpoint and so they lapse into “Motherhood is good!” Pablum. It’s only human nature that you don’t want to get cancelled from the biggest job website in the world.

See the paradox? LinkedIn has become a kind of “anti-Twitter” in which the only real “news” is someone announcing they got a new job, and they’re just thrilled to be taking over as associate director of Bumper Stickers ‘R’ Us in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Now that’s all fine, but Jeez, it’s boring, and it means then that LinkedIn has little to offer beyond its profiles and job listings. There is no great intellectual interaction, and you might say, Well, that’s not what it’s there for, but then why bother to allow posts at all? And why should we keep playing this game of never tossing out provocative thoughts or notions?

When I began complaining on LinkedIn about the abysmal lineups and substandard reporting on CTV News and CBC, I noticed my profile views shot up, which was not my goal, but the effect sure was interesting. I got the distinct impression of “Who is this stranger pointing out how our emperors have no clothes? And he’s doing it here! Where our hands are getting tired from clapping each other’s backs!” It wasn’t so much a sign that others thought my criticisms were valid but that someone had dared to make a substantial, critical comment.

Which brings us to a bit of sage wisdom which is in fact genuinely toxic. A veteran Canadian reporter for some of the biggest operations in the country, now a freelancer, posted this, which is hardly original and yet it got more than a 100 thumbs up:

“Here’s some friendly advice for the PR folks out there: Don’t pitch journalists your clients. Pitch us stories. That’s all. Thank you.”

I won’t name the reporter because it’s not about them, and it could have just as easily been posted by someone else. But I think I’ll go crazy if I don’t write an article that pushes back against this “advice.”

I find this attitude and the plaudits that it’s getting to be morally repulsive and disturbing. And if you’re a reporter, so should you.

It’s the second time in a handful of days that I’ve seen a journalist or a journalist-turned-PR flack try to skirt or rationalize what the PR profession is really about. In that case, the communications professional suggested to their audience that no, reporters weren’t going over to the “Dark Side” — it was about helping “to build brands.” I nearly exploded that time and began a since-discarded post with “What a crock.” But this latest post about “advice” is too much to go unchallenged.

First, why on Earth are you giving friendly advice to PR flacks? They are not supposed to be a damn resource for you as a journalist. As a reporter, your job is to get off your ass and go out and get news that people should care about. You should come up with your own damn ideas, not gobble from the spoon shoved under your mouth by comms people.

The very notion that a reporter should tell a comms flack, “This is the best way to sell me” should make the stomach churn.

Because you are conceding that you can be bought.

Oh, you say you can’t? You’re going to be the pure-driven-snow journalist who says, “Aha, there’s an agenda, but I won’t follow it!” Really? Are you fucking kidding me?

You’ve already capitulated if you choose to write about the angle they’re peddling. On cue, someone out there will no doubt pipe up, “No, that’s not true at all! I could have got the angle from somewhere else!” Then why the hell didn’t you? And that smooth talker on the other end of that line, whether it be a phone or a Zoom call, will have already come bearing gifts: sources.

Such wonderfully, conveniently available sources! Why it’s as if you barely had to do any digging at all!

There will be those who claim it’s no big deal. That professional communications are so pervasive and so integrated into news and media culture that at worst, I must be a fossil — preferring the good ol’ days when the relationship between reporters and flacks was more adversarial — or that I’m riding the biggest, irrelevant high horse.

To which I would say: Shame on you.

Over this weekend, someone gave me as a present Tim Schwab’s book, The Bill Gates Problem. My friend can’t stop gushing about this brilliant work of investigative reporting, and it’s easy to see why. Instead of reading from the start, I dived into the chapter on journalism… And I was horrified to discover the extent to which Gates and his foundation throw money at some of the biggest news organizations in the West — from NPR to Huffington Post to New Humanitarian to The Economist — and then, of course, comes the quid pro quo. The PR flacks apply the weight of all that money and the foundation’s influence on what’s being covered. What stories should be done, how they should be done — and they get it.

That’s what you’re defending.

Oh, you say the money is the real issue? It’s one issue, yes, but the reason why the Gates Foundation gets away with this kind of thing is because he was given a free ride decades ago — long before he realized he could just outright buy the media.

Because comms professionals pitched him as “an innovator” and then as a cuddly philanthropist (Note to my followers: I intend to write more about Gates and the horrors he’s perpetrating on Ethiopia and the rest of the developing world in the near future, and Schwab has given me a practical map to follow).

He’s getting away with it, as are others, because of the ever-expanding complacency in the journalistic profession. The stain spreads and no one bothers to clean it up. Instead, you get a BS rationalization that no, you’re not joining the Dark Side.

Let’s not forget how public relations got its start: as a way to promote the Ku Klux Klan.

Not kidding, you can check it out — this fact was even included in my old Public Relations textbook. Does it need to be always on the Dark Side? Of course not. But let’s please not kid ourselves: the trade is inherently manipulative. You are trying to sell the best face of your client and plant their message. That is not the same thing as getting all the facts and presenting the truth.

I’ve done communications. I shilled for the Ontario government once upon a time, and I knew the power of what we can do when I heard my own copy come out of the mouth of the CBC Toronto news anchor word-for-word one day at the top of the 6 pm broadcast. The lazy bastards hadn’t even bothered to adjust the lead. Fortunately, it was a good news story about more help for people with disabilities, but do you really want to live in that kind of world where the flacks get their copy passed wholesale?

I once steered a reporter for a well-known daily onto a good story because he rang me up, trying to do a hit piece on the provincial government, not realizing that the province didn’t even have jurisdiction over his supposed “scandal.” Had I not given him something, he would only have tried smearing the ministry on another topic, so I redirected his energies. That was my job, and I was good at it.

So, please don’t give me any hokum that the reporter acted ethically by “working with” me. He greedily took my suggested sources, and off he went.

Yes, there is a place for professional communications, and at its best, it can help steer reporters towards crucial stories they have too long ignored, whether it be climate change or badly needed legislation to fix systemic problems of social infrastructure or put a spotlight on the situation for indigenous communities.

My own personal view is that communications does its best work when it parks the client’s message and merely seeks to present facts or correct wrong information. In those cases, it can be a force for good, even through the smallest of contributions. As easy examples, we have finally “cured” reporters from stupidly referring to physically disabled people as “confined to wheelchairs” — no one confined them. We no longer let newspapers get away with a whole host of racial, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation slurs. This progress wasn’t merely the work of activists but the comms professionals for advocacy groups long after the marches and protests were over.

But whatever the story, whatever the issue, the relationship between a reporter and a PR flack should always remain fiercely adversarial.

If I’m the reporter, I prefer to take your handouts grudgingly if at all, and I want to scrutinize the hell out of even the idea you’re offering me. You as a PR person are not my friend, not my colleague, not my drinking buddy, not my collaborator. If journalism is about speaking truth to power and holding it accountable, I need to keep a safe distance from power’s mouthpiece — whether it’s cultural power, financial power, government power or other forms. I expect no less when I’m in comms.

As a freelancer who does comms these days, there’s no hypocrisy in my approach because the journalistic establishment is already hostile to my clients, who for the most part are Africans — ones ignored, slandered and marginalized by a journalistic establishment that is too lazy to even talk to them to find out something new besides what’s on the AP or Reuters wire (let alone pick up a history book to get proper background).

You bet I harbor resentment for any journalist who says, “Here’s some friendly advice on how to pitch me.”

Reporters are now so lazy that they simply quote the representatives of Amnesty and Human Rights Watch instead of visiting a crisis site in Africa in person, acting as mere stenographers for what yes, are still PR flacks.

One day, they may wake up to realize that these organizations have very sinister agendas (which I have written about before), only it will be too late.

They won’t be able to question because they won’t have gone digging, they won’t have bothered to read the necessary background. Because the investigative muscles they should be constantly using have atrophied. By then, they’ll only be able to lean forward and take the spoonful of crap poised under their mouths.