'PUBLIC ODIUM,' THE PRESS, AND PROs SIR,—But PR. is wasteful.
I, as a journalist, find my- self receiving sheets of PR 'news' by every post, nearly all of it related to a subject I long ago ceased to write about. There must be armies of people behind the scenes writing, typing, duplicating and addressing information to people who don't want it. Worse, even when I did write articles on the subject related to the circulars, I never once found anything on the handouts I wanted to use and within a few months learned to toss them unopened into .the wastepaper basket.
The truth is that most firms who employ PR men do not have enough genuine information for dis- semination to keep anybody perpetually busy. Since PR men are usually naturally hard workers, they dutifully churn out large quantities of synthetic 'news.' This is ultimately self-defeating because journalists become too weary of working through mounds of rubbish to notice the few grains of hard fact which appear. Like other kinds of salesmen PR are rapidly educating us to ignore everything they say.
If the aim of PROs really was to let us have facts, or what Robert Homby of the Church In- formation Office calls 'letting the dog see the rabbit,' no journalist would wish to be rude. But too many adopt the paternal attitude of Mr. Stephen Parkinson in last week's Spectator. 'Sometimes facts must be withheld in the public interest.' What facts? And when?
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