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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (516504)	12/28/2003 11:12:11 AM
From: PartyTime	Respond to of 769670

Being from Bahston, I've read Jacoby for a very long time. And ya know what? He hasn't gotten it right to date. Here, read this instead: All the spin doctors' news that's fit to leak Newspapers' reliance on public relations companies could cost them dear in the long run, writes Patrick Weever Sunday November 9, 2003 The Observer Seymour Hersh, who exposed the My Lai massacre and deserves a medal for being the most persevering muckraker in the journalism business, may continue to ADVERTISEMENT howl into the wilderness but there is little doubt that investigative journalism has lost its glamour. The successors to the starry-eyed kids who flooded media schools after All The Presidents Men are Thatcher's children, focused on self enrichment in 'communications'. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the Washington Post sleuths who exposed Watergate, are a dying breed. Gather round ye ghosts of Fleet Street past for a seminar at the Reuters building on Thursday on the new and coming journalism. It is sponsored by the Media Society and titled 'Flacks and Hacks: Has PR Taken Over Journalism?'. But the saddest line is a throwaway 'Does it Matter?' Today you can walk from one end of Fleet Street to the other without meeting a journalist and Reuters itself is headed for the barren soul lessness of Docklands. Maybe the ghosts have left too, maybe it is good they should be spared this ignominy. I am a panellist in this discussion and have been asking myself: why? Well one reason is to answer the question 'Does it matter?' by saying 'Yes, my God it matters'. But how have we got to the point where the question would be taken seriously? In the Eighties my old City editor on the Birmingham Post was still joking that the correct relationship between a journalist and a PR man was that of a dog and a lamp-post. But now the journalist is too often the lamppost and PR has taken over the world. When in the Nineties the now defunct magazine Brill's Content said that 'newspapers love an issue, but there is one issue that is never discussed - that issue is the expropriation of newspapers by the public relations industry' it all seemed very daring. Yesterday's sensation is today's commonplace and now we have the weary half-hearted question: does it matter? As long ago as 1985 the book PR: How the Public Relations Business Writes the News was published. Authors Jeff and Marie Blyskal say the press has become 'frighteningly dependent' on PR and the relationship is part of the behind-the-scenes press functioning. Many media critics complain that this relationship is not properly reported on or analysed because it would fall apart if it was. But of course matters are not that simple: the staggeringly lucrative public relations business was created and developed mostly by us journalists. Listen to the late Stanley Gale, ex-journalist, long-time friend and the founder of financial PR in London: 'A scoop is some thing that one of the parties does not want published. When it is published because the parties concerned do want it published it is not a scoop - it is a leak. 'The purpose of that system is twofold. First it is an attempt to swap news for views - the PR hopes that in exchange for exclusives a City editor will support his clients when needed. Second, predators want the shares of their targets in the hands of speculators and a well-placed tip in the financial pages of the press can aid that purpose.' According to George Pitcher, author of The Death of Spin, this story tells us much of what we need to know both of the subsequent development of financial PR and how good and bad practice developed in the modern political spin doctor. I was asked to put the anti-PR case at this seminar. But I am not anti-PR. PR and journalism at their best both have a massive contribution to make to the public good. My website, anti-spin.com, is what it says: anti-spin. Those who want the brilliantly researched anti-PR case can turn to a book like Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, damn lies and the public relations business by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. This weekend Rampton said: 'Many of of the people who work in public relations are former journalists who know how newsrooms operate and how to get their client's version of the facts into stories. They spend huge amounts of time and money compiling lists of journalists and even dossiers so that they know what individual journalists think and believe. They even keep track of reporters' hobbies with an eye to finding ways of gaining access and influence. In addition they are not at all shy of using their clients' clout as advertisers to put pressure on journalists.' He adds that university researchers typically find that somewhere between 40 and 60 per cent of what appears in a daily newspaper originates with a public relations firm. Richard Keeble, Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln, says: 'The mainstream media, because they are so closely integrated within the dominant financial structures, are rapidly losing public trust with their over-reliance on PR. Radical, alternative media that, in contrast, are run on a non-commercial basis and founded on non-hierarchical principles may be marginalised - but they offer important organisational, ethical and political critiques the mainstream can ill afford to ignore.' The concentration of the media in a handful of multi-nationals is eroding journalistic values. Journalism is expensive, investigative journalism ferociously so. PR news is not just cheap, it is free. In the short term it aids the bottom line, in the long term it destroys the brand. It is not irrational for some tycoons to say, with Keynes, that in the long term we are all dead, so let's milk the brand now. But it may be expensive for democracy. observer.guardian.co.uk