An interesting conversation I had with a retired writer who worked in PR and marketing.
-------------
I
trained as a journalist but worked mostly in PR and marketing. It’s
true that PR’s and marketing’s goals are to manage the company’s or
person’s reputation, which means encouraging positive news coverage and
downplaying/minimizing negative news.
However, outright
falsehoods is not part of the job. Still, with some industries, it can
become a slippery slope, which is why I refused to work for cigarette
makers or oil companies.
When a PR company sends a press release
to a newspaper or news organization, it is up to that news organization
to ensure that its contents are factual. But that also depends on the
validity of that so-called news organization.
Thanks to social
media and the internet, there are a lot of sites/people claiming to be
journalists but have no training or legitimate credentials. For
instance, Julian Assange is not a journalist and Wikileaks was never a
bonafide journalistic news source.
Unfortunately, even though
this person may have committed wrongdoing, she is associated with a
celebrity, making the story ripe for paparazzi (so-called journalists
out for a story to make a name for themselves) and vulnerable to the
swampy side of social media, where truth can more easily be manipulated.
