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Thanks for posting the article, Lex. I found it very interesting. I've been in PR for only a few years now and when I ponder it, Mr. Graham is right. Whether they work for a firm or they direct the communications effort for an entity, PR people are paid to get their companies, or their companies ideals out into the news. We are, in effect, paid to sway public opinion.

But I think that there are other entities, (for lack of a better word), that achieve the same goal all around us. There are lobbyists in DC that do the same thing to legislators who make policy that affects all of us. There are newspaper journalists who push their agenda (liberal and conservative) in their writings.

And because the public is too busy or just not inclined to do the fact checking for themselves, they buy in to what they read. Now, I'm writing in generalities--there are certainly those who do not fit the mold that I just cast.

But it is interesting and I think a worthy reminder to readers to ponder the possible origins of news stories and to make up their own minds.

I hope the editors of your Life section read your posting, Mr. Alexander. They routinely (pourposely?) fall prey to the PR folks' web. I realize papers your size have their limitations, but they can and must do better.

Randy, having spent four years as assistant features editor, I can tell you why that is: We don't have a Features staff large enough to cover everything ourselves, particularly national stories, so we have to rely on the wires -- Associated Press, plus contributions from the member papers of the New York Times, Knight Ridder/Tribune and LA Times/Washington Post services. And many of those stories do appear to originate with PR.

That said, one bit of context that I left out of my original post is that that kind of widespread success by a PR effort is more the exception than the rule within that industry. For every big hit, there are a lot of misses.

Lex, Just because the wires send out a story doesn't mean Life or any other part of the newspaper has to run it. I wonder: when Knight Ridder sends out a stgory saying that such in such is the next hot color (last year it was brown), do your editors or reporters make the effort to see if that's true? I don't see it in the reporting.

Randy, I'd be the last person to say doing so was an affirmatively good idea, but when I was in Features, some days we had two choices: run with the wires or run a lot of white space. Our reporters were too busy reporting their own stories to fact-check someone else's.