(The following is excerpted from a longer version published on Harold Burson’s Blog. It was written in response to a commentary by a legal commentator on CBS “Sunday Morning” who equated public relations to lying.)
Never unemployed and engaged in public relations all my working life, I calculated that, in the context of the CBS “Sunday Morning” commentary, I have been lying for more than 60 years – maybe a qualification for the Guiness record book.
This inference neither troubles me personally nor do I believe it harms me professionally. But I am highly irritated about what it says about the thousands of corporate executives, government officials, NGO advocates, and, perhaps most significant of all, editors and reporters with whom I have worked and shared confidences for six decades – not to speak of the millions of people around the world who have been the recipients of information I have had a hand in crafting.
I submit they’re smarter than what the CBS commentary implies. I don’t believe those with whom I have worked to disseminate my clients’ messages are so gullible (or so dumbly obliging) to be parties to the communication of lies. On the contrary, I think editors and reporters have played an important role holding public relations professionals like me to acceptable standards of fact and decency.
The grey area – as with all manner of media – is not in reporting facts. Rather, it’s in how those facts are interpreted. Increasingly, news media are in the business of interpretation and commentary, areas once confined to the editorial page. Many if not most newsmen forget that we in public relations are not surrogates of journalists or media. Rather, we are the paid advocates of clients who have a point of view that may be questioned by affected parties. Our interpretation in serving our clients may differ from how a reporter reacts to the same set of facts. But this is nothing new in the world of journalism; editorial writers frequently have differing points of view than those expressed in a publication’s news columns.
But three score years of working in this arena have convinced me that, after all is said and done, the public gets it right. The fact is, an individual, an organization, a product gets only one chance to lie to the public. Even in a nation of 300 million, the public early on arrives at a collective opinion – and lying over even the short run simply doesn’t work in a democratic society.
Harold Burson
Founding Chairman
Burson-Marsteller
Mr. Burson is spot on. Where a lie continues to be believed…it is usually that the recipient is a willing participant in the lie. I might add that it is ironic that a member of the legal fraternity, which itself has a reputation for lies (along with politicians I have often heard), should be making such as an observation. The moral of that story being no one profession has cornered the market on lies. Instead of pointing fingers, we should all be busily engaged in ensuring that we are not part of the problem.
Thank you for this synopsis and thoughtful insight on what many of us felt was indeed a wrong characterization of our profession. You’re absolutely right. The public plays an important role as fact-checkers, and anyone who thinks fooling the public will grant him/her success should double-check all the crisis case studies provided through the years.