PR time

ELECTIONS ARE among the best of times for public relations organizations and practitioners. Philippine politicians need favorable media exposure, or exposure whether good or bad. Being mentioned in the media keeps the politician in the public mind if not its eye, and it doesn’t usually matter whether the mention is positive or negative.

Name recall is exactly that: it’s the name that’s remembered, not its connection with any issue, event or process, unless the name is associated, in the Philippine setting at least, with corruption or some other crime so horrendous and so egregious the name becomes synonymous with it.

To be in the public mind and to stay in it for the duration of a Philippine election campaign, one needs the help of a public relations person who usually doesn’t go by that label but is often known by such titles as “media handler,” “media strategist,” or “publicist,” among others.

The media handler or publicist can be, but is not necessarily, a public relations professional, meaning someone who’s a regular in the business and not an occasional practitioner. In the Philippines he or she can also be a journalist, or just someone who has the connections with the press and media that can help get his or her client into the media, specially television—or who has no compunctions about dispensing the usual envelopes. The term “media handler,” for the frequency of the latter practice, is particularly apt.

Some journalists—admittedly only a few of them—despise public relations people including their own colleagues who double as PRs for supposedly corrupting journalists, or at least contributing to press and media corruption. But there’s really no shortage of journalists who can be bought or who’re for sale. Publicists whether during election campaign seasons or in-between argue that  not only are they only responding to a demand when they bribe someone to get his or her client’s name in the paper, or manage to have him or her mentioned over radio or TV. What’s more, they also have to get their jobs done, and for that they need the media and the press—of  which, some of them believe, they’re a part anyway.

The basis of this claim is the PR person’s need for the same writing skills as a journalist. A press release is after all technically the same as a news report. What’s more, there is seeming agreement between journalists and professional public relations people that truth-telling as well as fairness and accuracy—fundamental values in journalism—are as important in the latter profession as in the press. Truth-telling, accuracy, and fairness are usually described in PR conferences as necessary qualities in any PR campaign, and as a public responsibility acknowledged in practically every public relations code of ethics.

Do the apparent commonality of professional skills and seeming adherence to the same standards of behavior then mean that PR is a form of journalism?

The use of the same skills doesn’t make two professions, occupations, or undertakings the same. PR practitioners do use such journalistic skills as news and feature writing, but for a particular purpose journalists’ use of the same skills does not advance.

The crucial difference between journalism and public relations is whom they serve. Public relations practitioners serve the client, whether an individual, a company or a political party, the image of which it is his or her aim to enhance through the media. Journalists are expected to serve the public, for which purpose truth-telling, accuracy, and fairness are indispensable, and deviation from which he or she must be accountable to his or her peers, organization, and public.

The difference in purpose often results in a conflict between PR and journalism. Enhancing the image of a client can involve bending the truth, distorting information, or concealing it, and are contrary to the responsibility of journalists to serve the public, whose need for information demands completeness, accuracy, and fairness, no matter their impact or consequence on the journalist’s employers. The differences between journalism and public relations are so fundamental as to be irreconcilable.

The bad news is that because of the similarity of the skills needed in journalism and public relations, and, even more fundamentally, the looseness of many practitioners in each profession’s understanding of their respective roles and consequent responsibilities, journalists sometimes—often, many would argue—end up doing public relations, while public relations people end up doing journalism.

The result is a conflict of interest because of the confusion over which is which. It often happens that during election season, a journalist becomes a campaigner, whether paid or voluntary, for a politician or political party while remaining a columnist. On the other hand a public relations practitioner who becomes a columnist because of the same confusion, proceeds to use his column to campaign for a candidate, or, during election off-season, uses that column for the benefit of a client.

The losers are the voters, whose choices on who their next leaders will be can be the result of the often unremarked and hardly recognized role of public relations and of journalism during election campaigns including the present one. It’s a form of manipulation no one, whether manipulator or manipulated, is usually aware of, but which, unrecognized, has had far reaching consequences on how this country has been and will continue to be governed.