Roundabout
Feeding the Press
He has an absolutely scandalous job,' my uncle said once of an old cricketing friend. 'He's supposed to get hidden advertising into news- paper articles so that nobody realises it's ad- vertising. Disgraceful!' It took seven years for me to realise the man must have been a PRO.
Considering that the initials PRO stand for public relations officer, it is amazing how little the public knows about their activities. The woman who opens her magazine and reads Maudina Mudpack, our Beauty Editor, advising Worried Blackheads that 'There is an excellent preparation now on the market that deals with just your trouble' may or may not think that Maudina Mudpack has scoured the shops looking for such a preparation. But she certainly does not realise that a PRO gave a little party, at the Savoy, handed out information sheets and samples of the thing, invited Maudina Mudpack out to lunch for a future date, filled up the glasses and sat back; and that the 'mention' is the end- result of this process.
ThiS is, of course, only one aspect of PR, since everyone from the Ministry of Housing to Horror Films Inc. has a PRO these days; even the Institute of Public Relations has, like the picture on the HP sauce bottle, its own PRO: a Mr. Eric Williams. The Institute, Mr. Williams informs me, exists to give professional status and cohesion to its members; a necessary if for- lorn task, since the qualifications for PR are so vague that it inevitably attracts large numbers of strays from other professions. He tells me that it takes at least £2,000 to handle even a small account; that an experienced PRO is paid £1,500 upwards; and that no, they have not yet defined, a set of ethics for PROs to follow.
There are three basic types of PRO. There are the ones who are attached to one firm only; if they are any good, they may get to know a great deal about what the firm makes. There are the PROs employed to promote a category of goods or an idea rather than one particular product; they agitate for better roads or more consump- tion of Vitamin C and have names like the Wire Wool Secretariat or the Lard Council.
These may be pernicious in the long run if the notions they are promoting are pernicious; in the short run they are easy to deal with, because they are easy to mention : no journalist minds dragging words like 'butter' into his copy.
The third kind, constantly taking over the work of the other two, are the PROs who work for the big firms—often merely branches of ad- vertising firms in plushy neighbourhoods.
They claim that, as specialists in PR, they do it better than one-horse PROs who just repre- sent one horse. In my experience, this is mani- festly not so. Quite apart from the fact that they frequently know less about the firms they repre- sent than anyone else except the nightwatchman, one is maddened far more and far oftener by the big firms than by any other kind of PR. (I should perhaps explain that journalists are mad- dened not only when they are not open to per- suasion and resent the implication that they are, but also if, like a girl being seduced in a snow- storm, they do not so much mind being corrupted as feel that this is not the way to do it.) They send the same handout indiscriminately to all news- papers, suggesting that the Times send a photo- grapher to cover the sight of a starlet being thrown into the Thames, or offering recipes to the New Statesman. They are so impressively busy that they are never actually there; and it becomes as difficult to catch the elusive PRO as it used to be to catch the managing director. They often actually stand between the journalist and the story, staying in the room to ensure that the film star being interviewed says nothing of any interest to any human being, or constantly fobbing off a journalist who wants to interview a man who has been in the trade twenty-five years, with a smiling girl who has been 'handling the account' for six months. And they are terribly, terribly friendly, counting themselves as your bosom friends on second meeting; this friendship will not stand up to a journalist being rude about the product nor ensure that the new friend's name is spelt correctly.
They buy lunches: and there can be few things more absurd than the sight of one woman who does not want to be fatter stuffing a heavy lunch into another woman who does not want to be fatter so as to put her under an obligation.
It is hard to know what tactics a journalist can employ against this undermining bonhomie. One can say, as a man on the Guardian used to say when PROs asked him out to lunch, old boy: 'If you have anything to sell I shall be in my office from ten to eleven.' One can set about offending all the PROs one knows—and it would be easy, satisfying work. But then you cut yourself off from a great deal of useful infor- mation; and also from many pleasant people with whom, if it were not for this wretch thing about their product, one would be hap to lunch anyway.
Granted that PROs do produce informatioe and that many of them are pleasant people; they are still good reasons for getting upset about continuing spread of PR.
There is the quite straightforward danger a misinformation: that if the only way in which I journalist can get information is through a PO and the PRO is too fly to let slip anythtli derogatory to her client, the journalist's chant' of a clear picture are much reduced. It is elr' tainly easier to get some information out 011 firm with a PRO than a firm without one; but much harder to be sure what sort of informa(0 you are getting. There is the similar danger jai' plied in the comment of one of the nicest PRO 1 know, who complained of journalists wh° `get information out of you and then never met' tion the pro.luct.' As PR grows, more and mart information will contain advertising. (The batik has already been lost in show business, whey' even the BBC acknowledges theatres an'i, managements; I suppose it is only a matter 01 time before even Mr. Marples appears by re mission of HM Government.) But the most 'sinister aspect of press relation' is their effect on the press themselves. We aft getting flabby. We are more and more inclined —especially in the women's field—to select Iron' the material that is offered us instead of starting from scratch on our own account. One PRO saYs that even in the four years she has been in the business the press have become much more 0 to use handout material in an unchanged ce dition. And we are often quite uncot; sciously being muzzled by the `friendship' we have built up with nice PROs. A great dol of the gloss, the lack of criticism, the convenient avoidance of the darker aspect of any consume( product—all this is usually attributed to a desirt to avoid annoying the advertisers. My feeling's that it is much more result of not wanting (° annoy PROs. For the faceless monolith of Y" brand, which any journalist would be happy to attack, we substitute the known and lilecd face of Mrs. X, and hold our fire. Fighting PR is not easy, not profitable and not always useful. But it is worth remembering that in this, as with other forms of depressit"' it is only the bum who accepts the handout.
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