More from The Cluetrain Manifesto:
Ironically, public relations has a huge PR problem: people use it as a synonym for BS. The call of the flack has never been an especially honorable one. There is no Pulitzer Prize for public relations. No Peabody, Heismann, Oscar, Emmy, Eddy, or Flacky. Like all besieged professions, PR has its official bodies, which do indeed grant various awards, degrees, and titles. But do you know what they are? Neither do most PR people. Say that you’re an award-winning PR person and most people will want to change their seats.
Everyone -- including many PR people -- senses that something is deeply phony about the profession. And it’s not hard to see what it is. Take the standard computer-industry press release. With few exceptions, it describes an "announcement" that was not made, for a product that was not available, quoting people who never said anything, for distribution to a list of people who mostly consider it trash.
Dishonesty in PR is pro forma. A press release is written as a plainly fake news story, with headline, dateline, quotes, and all the dramatic tension of a phone number. The idea, of course, is to make the story easy for editors to "insert" in their publications. [from chapter four]
Comment: So, what does the Diocese of Central NY do when they get in a bit of a jam? They hire a public relations firm. You would think that a church organization with professional speakers (if we can rightly call clergy this) could find someway to communicate the truth of a situation without having to hire a p.r. firm. Did it surprise the DCNY staff that the media went around their p.r. flack and apparatus and talked to individual priests to get the real scoop. Everyone knows, and especially news reporters do, that p.r. people are not about promoting the truth. It even looks sleazy that a church organization would hire a p.r. flack. No wonder this diocese is falling apart.
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