David Miller, 17 July 2009

'It is sometimes possible to think here in the world of specialised journalism', reads a bracing editorial in Research Fortnight, 'that public relations is closing in for the final kill.'

The editorial surveys the seven research councils, the main science and social science funding bodies in the UK. 'How many communications managers, press officers, science writers and assorted PRs do they employ?' Noting there are 'maybe 50 in total', it also notes that UK universities typically 'must now have between three and 13 communications professionals, depending on how ‘world class’ it is.' This gives a total of perhaps 500 PRs between the 150 of them.

Comparing public relations with the Metropolitan police treatment of G20 demonstrators the paper bemoans the inability of the specialist press to cope with the attentions of the PR people:

Research Fortnight and Times Higher, with a few staff reporters each, are the only publications that give a damn what these organisations actually do. No wonder we can sometimes feel like protesters stuck on a City street, ‘kettled’ by riot police, and not even allowed to go to the toilet.

According to Research fortnight this picture is set to get worse with PR possibly becoming a core part of the research process:

In the forthcoming Research Evaluation Framework, citations may be on the way out. But as Lord Drayson has made clear, ‘public impact’ is on the way in. The disciplines with the best PR will have the ball at their feet. Britain’s astronomers should do well—there only are about 60 of them, and half of those seem to be regulars on the Today programme. Biotechnology is another sure-fire winner: it may have no drugs, and have left billions behind in losses for its mug shareholders—but it has always had great PR.

A striking example of the infiltration of PR into research follows:

At a recent European Commission meeting in Prague, researchers packed into one hall to learn how to bring PR agents into their grant collaborations. European Union rules encourage this, apparently. In which case, why not just go the whole hog, and have the PRs organise the project, with the scientists and the odd philosopher in the back seat?

Of course where there is a PR agent there is also a client.  Most of them are corporate interests.  But - because of the intrinsic lack of transparency attendant on PR -  it is often difficult to tell where the corporations end and the academics begin.  Take the recent example of schmoozing undertaken at Gleneagles Hotel by Prof Tom MacDonald from Dundee University as part of his attempts to recruit GPs to a drugs trial.  Prof MacDonald happily admits that he did not disclose the fact that the entire trial (posh nosh at the 5 star luxury Gleneagles hotel included) is funded by Pfizer the drugs giant.  If Pfizer had undertaken such an event it would have breached the code of practice of the ABPI the pharma lobby group and (self) regulator.  This example shows again how any story with a PR involvement needs careful excavation of hidden funding and influence.  This in turn suggests both the need for transparency in research and in the other activities of corporations and PR firms as well as  a clear sense of the practice of PR.  This needs to be built on empirical case studies rather than lazy generalisations.  It is not enough to say there are contending versions of what PR is.  To do so is to negate the findings of empirical research on the actual manipulative and deceptive practices of the PR industry. More importantly, it also risks taking at face value the statements of PR advocates, rather than analysing them in relation to the evidence.  Amongst the wealth of such data is that which indicates that PR agencies are paid to dissemble and that their statements are often misleading or untrue at best.

A recent special issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication on 'Rethinking public relations' appears to have been one victim of the 'kettling' citing approvingly the PR apologist Ray Hiebert who famously claimed that 'without public relations, democracy could not succeed in mass society'.[3] The most obvious riposte to this is to ask whether democracy is currently succeeding in the advanced neoliberal nations of the West?  In fact PR was invented specifically and openly in order that democracy could not succeed.  to go along with Hiebert we need to forget any idea that there is any form of human communication that is not synonymous with spin and deception.  It is not PR that democracy needs to survive but communication, debate and decision.  All of these are undermined by deception and manipulation, both of which are essential to the modern public relations industry.

The first line of defence against such practices is to ensure by legal measures that transparency is observed and deception halted.

References

[1] 'Kettled' Editorial, Research Fortnight Issue 328, 15 Jul 09.

[2] See Marisa De Andrade 'No free Lunch?', Spinwatch 20 June 2009, (originally published in the Scotsman 16 June 2009);Tom MacDonald 'No free lunch' Letter to the Scotsman, Published Date: 23 June 2009; David Miller 'Need for clarity' Letter to the Scotsman Published Date: 29 June 2009.

[3] Josh Greenberg and Graham Knight 'Rethinking public relations' Editorial Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol. 34 (2009) 198-187.