Examination of a single, widely-reported story in the press on any day of the week will yield as many different versions of the story as newspapers in which it is covered. At the top of the field, the Financial Times will offer a largely factual account and, at the bottom, the Daily Mail, Express, Sun, Mirror and Star will offer simplifications, distortions and emphases designed to produce the greatest sense of drama and reflect a worldview of the editor’s own imagining, rendering the actual ‘story’ almost redundant.
Into this situation, the Blair administration introduced counter-measures – generally characterised as ‘spin’. As a result, the public was increasingly faced with a pitched battle between one set of distortions and another in a continual struggle to present the ‘truth.’ That neither side seems prepared to accept their part in this situation represents a fundamental, comprehensive atmosphere of self- delusion across the political classes.
The stated purpose of the essays collected in Where The Truth Lies is to examine the relationship between journalism and PR. As it stands, the relationship is one of mutual mistrust. The mechanisms of the public relations industry are frequently attacked within the book by journalists who refuse to countenance the idea that PRs are to be trusted, when in reality so much of what newspapers print is barely re-written PR copy. There is an understandable frustration expressed on this point by several of the essays by PR agents, who moan that while journalists are happy enough to take the copy and work it into something which fills space, they continue to disparage those in the field of PR who are saving them the effort of having to leave to office to find their stories.
The fact of the matter is that PR can fulfil a useful role: making available useful information, much of which is worthy of press attention. Developments in medical science, the latest figures from leading businesses, and reports commissioned by charities are just a few of the fields which are fed to the press in this way. Granted, they are presented with a certain level of gloss and with an agenda, but this does not render the basic facts presented any the less true.
By the same token, it should be acknowledged that the organs of the British press are not solely concerned with the accurate reporting of events. They are also in the business of trying to entertain their own demographic of readers, many of whom - it must be assumed - appear to respond most readily to stories which feature elements designed to frighten, scandalise, or enrage. It must also be recognised that journalists, as a result of these tendencies in their readers, pander to such tastes in their writing.
That this collection, edited by Julia Hobsbawm, coincides closely with the launch of the networking organisation and magazine, Editorial Intelligence, which is also edited by Julia Hobsbawm, gives a fairer idea of its true purpose - to legitimise with pseudo-academic essays a position which has been widely derided as shaky at best. Hobsbawm believes that journalists and those working in the PR industry have a great deal in common, and seeks to build stronger links between the two professions. It is ironic that virtually everyone contributing essays to the book believes precisely the opposite. The cleverness here is that by even deigning to discuss this spurious proposition, all the contributors unwittingly give further credence that it is an idea with any basis in reality at all.
The fact that these essays span such a wide and diverse spread of experience within journalism and PR, and occasionally the intersections between them, also allows the proposition a greater chance of survival thanks to the complete lack of any real scrutiny.
The main problem with the collection, as touched on by a number of contributors - clearly frustrated by their lack of a clear brief, is that there is very little clarification of terms. ‘Truth’ is a difficult concept at the best of times. Doubly so when discussed solely by journalists and PRs. Truth is, after all, something of a moot point - while ‘fact,’ its less ambiguous cousin, is a far more useful commodity, and one which is mentioned far less often within the pages of this book. The very title of the collection – Where The Truth Lies – aside from being a neat pun, is a blind alley.
The sheer range of types in both journalism and PR also goes largely unaddressed. It is suggested that over 50 per cent of what one reads in a newspaper nowadays is the product of PR work, but there is no further breakdown of what this really means. There is no effort made by anyone to distinguish between, say, the public relations operations of a major record label and government ‘spin doctors.’ This is a serious fault as there is a world of difference between the news that Puff Daddy has bought a yacht and whether, for instance, a new commitment to a vast expansion of Britain’s nuclear energy industry is in everyone’s best interests. There is also a qualitative difference in the intentions behind these divergent fields. While entertainment PRs are essentially interested in securing free coverage for the celebrities or products that they represent, Government PR is concerned with putting its message across on stories which will usually be reported anyway as a matter of course. Similarly, journalism is frequently treated as a single entity: lumping the numerous foreign correspondents of the broadsheets into the same bracket as the ‘3AM Girls’ makes it impossible to make a single sensible point about either journalism or the effect of PR upon it.
A majority of the authors of essays in this collection tend to stick to what they know. The PRs tend to write frankly, or pleadingly, about how important their jobs really are, and how the world couldn’t function without them, in ways that - in the worst cases - cause the reader to wonder how on earth the writer has ever managed to eke out any sort of career making a case for anything. Similarly, many of the journalists writing in the collection exalt their profession in the most heightened Platonic terms imaginable, as if every article ever written for a newspaper was hewn from a rock of pure truth with tools of sheer objectivity.
The spread of articles offered in the collection is patchy: Peter Oborne simply rehashes, for the umpteenth time, his arguments against government ‘spin,’ which have already been written up into one book (The Rise of Political Lying) and countless columns in the Daily Mail, Evening Standard and Spectator. Simon Jenkins offers a characteristically Olympian viewpoint on the entire issue and indeed provides a far more sensible overview than the one written by the nominal editor - but offers only the lame conclusion that: ‘This collection is by way of being a conversation. But it is a conversation to a purpose. It is between professionals with many conflicting interests, but one that is shared, the maintenance of conversation as such. Long may it last.’
There is a hilariously po-faced ersatz-academic essay complete with diagrams of ‘ethical decision-making models’ from Anne Gregory who, we learn, is ‘the UK’s only full-time professor of public relations at Leeds Metropolitan University.’ Elsewhere, Emily Bell and Kim Fletcher offer the sort of fare to which readers of the Media Guardian are well used by now, except that cut loose from the useful moorings of news-related relevance their usually astute analysis drifts into generalised navel-gazing. Elsewhere, contributors ignore the brief of the book altogether and offer simple narratives concerning a single experience in their journalistic career (Janine de Giovanni) or more general points about international journalism (Nick Fraser).
The remainder of the book is stuffed with the thoughts of the editor’s friends and various non-entities, while the list of major omissions gives serious cause for concern. Where are the essays from Roy Greenslade or Stephen Glover - surely two of the most incisive commentators on the modern press? Or Piers Morgan, the former newspaper editor most obviously in the thrall of modern celebrity marketing? Or David Yelland, the former editor of the Sun who went on to work in PR? Or from the other side the almost mythical embodiment of modern PR, Lynne Franks? Or Max Clifford? Or Alistair Campbell? Or Peter Mandelson?
What this book fails to address is precisely that which it sets out to explore - what level of effect on journalism does PR have? Does PR compromise or enhance the public’s understanding of the world? And, is there sometimes a case to be made suggesting that PR offers a better degree of truth than journalism?
There is some considerable discussion in the book devoted to the notional ‘rise of spin’ in British politics - the blame for this being placed squarely against the door of the New Labour party machine. This pays little attention to the fact that in 1994, along with a party in some disarray, Tony Blair inherited a largely hostile national press, in the face of which, a bit of positive self-promotion seems like the only sane response.
How much actual effect newspapers and journalists have on their readers remains an unknown quantity. The claim that it was ‘the Sun wot won it’ appears to lose some value, when successive surveys find that the paper’s readership both fail to correctly identify its political bias, and, if they vote at all, vote in patterns demonstrating significant independence from its editorial line. The fact remains that journalism in this country is not a creature producing clear, unvarnished truth across the board, and this collection suffers for a refusal to face this fact. Similarly, despite Hobsbawm’s best attempts to argue to the contrary, most journalists understand that the job of the public relations sector is not to provide them with accurate reportage, but to present their clients in the best possible light. And herein lies the flaw of Hobsbawm’s project: any attempt at a greater degree of collusion between the two camps than already exists should be viewed with deep suspicion.
