PressEthic

I always thought it was odd that public relations was taught in the journalism school at my university. Not that it’s an inherently bad profession. Some of my best friends are PR students and they’re good people - even though we always joke that one day we’ll despise each other for making the other’s job a lot harder.

But, in several vital ways, PR isn’t really journalism.

When I started writing for my college paper, there was one lesson we baby reporters learned right away: Don’t use quotes from press releases.

Aside from the obvious reason that we should be doing our own reporting, our editor explained that in most cases the university president or similar big shot featured in the press release didn’t even say what he or she was quoted as saying.

Didn’t Jayson Blair get in a whole lotta trouble for that?

Fast forward from that moment five years ago to two days ago. A friend of mine who works in PR informed me he “made up his first quote today.” Apparently, the way this works is, once PR specialists have been at a job for a while, they get an ear for what their bosses would say.

Did he learn this in the same building where my classes debated whether it was kosher to even fix grammar in a quote?

Thursday’s edition of The Guardian included an article about PR getting the respect it deserved. The article stated that PR was becoming more crucial to businesses and a more multli-facted job, and I’m sure that’s true.

But that doesn’t mean they’re less the spin doctors they’ve built a reputation as being.

It doesn’t mean I never again will encounter that PR mouthpiece who doesn’t want to give me an interview with her boss but says she’ll see if there are any quotes on file that pertain to my story.

People who work in public relations are trying to do their jobs just like everyone else, and there are a lot of them who will honestly try to help journalists do their jobs. One isn’t better or worse than the other; it could just be as simple as two different schools of thought.

But I’ll have a lot more respect when they aren’t pulling the wool over my eyes.