News, Public Relations and Power

“We are living in increasingly ‘promotional times’” is the opening sentence of News, Public Relations and Power (2003), edited by Simon Cottle. For the consumer who is junking mail, this is hardly news: for the corporate communicator perusing acres of job ads, this is old news. However, for academics studying PR, the book's appearance is welcome news. Its publication signifies more attention to public relations, a topic often dismissed by media scholars as not worth studying (and their manner often has a de haut en bas quality). For media scholars, it signifies another switch from audience/media relations to source/media relations, the latter being media studies speak for the largest single component of public relations. In the text, the dimensions of PR growth are set out, as is how dominant institutions package their policy preferences for the media; how pressure groups, NGOs and quangos behave as news sources, and how tabloid television reproduces culture. The content therefore cover the PR of the most and the least powerful blocks in society, and the cultural impact of the most powerful medium. The reader is, in this way, offered learned insights into the inner workings of the promotional times in which we live. She is therefore better equipped to handle the question: “when times are more promotional, which is favoured – democracy as deliberation of issues or democracy as representation of interests?” The answer is probably the representation of interests, and if so, citizens, politicians and communicators should be more wary, for the outputs of source/media relations (therefore of PR) are persuasive at their best; manipulative in their middling manner, and propagandistic at their worst. The evidence of experience and of the literature is that more promotional times in a pluralist, liberal and market democracy is the victory of interests over the virtues of debate.