News-Record.com

"138 voted against the motion ... that "PR has a duty to tell the truth"

Well, at least they're honest about it.
:-)

re "the great efforts that some PR people make to convince management to release critical information and to be open and honest..." - I read recently someone expressing this as "The PR exec is management's conscience".
- which is a nice way of looking at it, although it does imply that the moral reasoning is on the level of "don't do that, or you'll be found out and punished".

one question, John - do you know if, when journalists-to-be get a degree in Communications, they get both the PR and the journo training?

Forget PR (in which, for a time, I once worked). Don't people have a duty to tell the truth?

Lex wrote:
"Don't people have a duty to tell the truth?"
No.
And people have no obligation to talk to reporters, either.

Appreciate the insight into your thought process on truth, jaycee. Of course, no one has to talk to reporters. That's hardly the question.

Anna, I don't know the answer, but perhaps one of the communication majors around here can answer it?

> With big corporations now hiring public relations firms to pay fake bloggers... many political bloggers are concerned that candidates, too, will hire people to pretend to be grass-roots citizens

what's scary is - from my area at least - how widespread this practice *already* seems to be. Quick&dirty way to estimate it - get your commenters on the record as to whether they think payola punditry is evil.

As someone who gets spun, mislead or lied to on a fairly regular basis, I find this conversation kind of funny. But I cover politics, and the only way to keep from crying to laugh.

With regard to the J-school question: I went to U of Md. for my MA. There were a few pr kids in some of the basic classes. Never saw them much and we didn't hang out. I've heard of a few schools (maybe even mine) moving the PR major to the biz school, which is where it belongs.

PR is not the practice of journalism. They have some skills in common, but serve very different types of masters.

With regard to political blogging: Anna's right, we'd be fools to think it's not already happening. Maybe not always in the straight cash-for-comment sense. But campaigns and causes are hiring people to be websters or getting existing staff to extend what they do for the cause to the online realm. And those people don't always declare their allegiances so you can tell.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: blogs are just tools. For all our optimism about the technology, it’s just a complex compilation of 1s and 0s that does nothing to adjust human nature. (Axes are useful for both chopping down trees, beheading snakes and going on bloody horror-movie-style rampages. Think of a blog as a really geeky axe.)

If you’re a lying, deceitful, Machiavellian hack in the real world, no piece of software is going to change that. It might, just might, make it easier to do your work though.

I was a Communications major, and we were were all on the journalism track with no marketing/PR classes. They started something right around the time I got there called "Integrated Marketing Communications" that was basically for future PR/ad types.

Thanks Mel, for the first-hand knowledge.

and Mark, "Think of a blog as a really geeky axe" is wonderful.

One last point, which I'm sorry I didn't make earlier: I don't know about jaycee's background in public relations, if any. But I have one: in New York, in the early 1980s, for a small but aggressive agency whose clients included UN agencies, think tanks, investment banks and manufacturers.

We informed. We definitely promoted. (I had greater coups, but my most fun was getting Sports Illustrated to mention the new, football-shaped conference table the Green Bay Packers had put in their corporate HQ. It was manufactured by a client of ours, a different part of the same company that made Kimball grand pianos, because they knew how to bend wood.)

But we didn't "spin" -- i.e., mislead -- and we didn't lie. That, the president made quite clear, was unacceptable.

Lex, in the post to which I responded you specifically said you were NOT referring to PR people. You said, "Forget PR, don't people have a duty to tell the truth?"
Everyday folks have no legal responsibility to tell the truth. Most do, some don't.
On the same note, do reporters have any obligation to tell the truth? Or are they free to use "some" facts to support their position without giving the reader the whole story? Does a reporter's parsing or "cherry-picking" relevant information constitute a "lie" by omission?
Inquiring minds want to know.

Well, now, jaycee, you have inserted the word "legal" into the discussion, a qualifier not there earlier.

Yes, jaycee, our reporters have a duty to seek and tell the truth. I would say that purposely omitting facts to support a position in a news story is a lie. (Happens in opinion pieces and even in comments here all the time.)

OK, Mr. Robinson, let's say ANY responsibility to tell the truth. The answer is still "No." Again, this refers to everyday folks and not to PR people, as specified by Lex.
The only "legal" responsiblity, of course, would be under oath in a court of law.
Thanks for the comment on reporters.

I admit that your answer surprises me, jaycee. Why don't you think that citizens have no duty to tell the truth? Much of civilized society stands firmly upon the belief that people are truthful.

I believe that people are truthful, too. But I don't think a "duty" exists, especially for everyday folks in everyday situations.
You won't go to jail for telling a lie, except in a legal situation.
Why do you think that everyday folks have an "obligation" to tell the truth to a news reporter?

I wasn't necessarily talking about "to a news reporter." The obligation/duty/responsibility is to society, not to a reporter. Civilized society is built upon the idea that people are honest and it breaks down when they aren't. If the presumption is, as it is in many sports, that an illegal action is OK so long as it not caught, then I'd suggest that society is the loser. I think that most people understand that, too. Plus, it's easy to be caught in a lie and enough times being caught and your personal credibility goes down the toilet.

Forget legal obligation for a moment, jaycee, and ponder the concept of the promise, which is a subset of telling the truth. A lot of philosophers, religious-studies professors and various other researchers place the promise second only to forgiveness as an abstract concept that makes civilization possible. It gives humankind at least limited control over the future, allows at least limited predictions (needed to test hypotheses in scientific theory, among other places) and lays the basis for the contract, as understood in ancient times and today.

We could presume no duty to tell the truth, then, but a lot of what makes life as we know it good and the future exciting would go by the boards. And part of what gives us the right to take part in whatever good there might be in that construct is the understanding of other people that we'll tell the truth, at least as we understand it.