'PUBLIC ODIUM,' THE PRESS AND PROs Sul,—No journalist, I am
proud to say, has attacked public relations more often in the pages of the Spectator than I have (though it may well be that Mesdames Whitehorn and Furlong, with their one superbly well-aimed volley apiece, have been more devastating). I take the strongest possible exception to the suggestion of your columnist, Queequeg, 'that the journalist's eagerness to denounce PROs has in it a suppressed desire to shift from the press a burden of public odium which is dimly felt to weigh upon it.
have been a journalist for a quarter of a century, virtually the whole of it divided into lengthy periods on the staffs, respectively, of the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Spectator and, now, the, Observer. As I feel no 'burden of public odium weighing upon any of these papers, or upon those who write for them, I do not need to shift it on to public-relations people. No, I wrote as I did not because I am ashamed of my profession—I am particularly proud of it, or I should have accepted one of the many lucrative offers made to me by public-relations firms—but because I came to learn, as Queequeg will if he ever takes to writing about consumer goods, that most public-relations people are ill-informed and intrus: ivc, parasites on their clients, pests to journalists, and burdens on the consumer. It will be apparent that I refer to public-relations firms, and to so- called 'consultants,' not to the people appointed by commercial and industrial firms, or by Government departments, to act as liaison officers with the public and the press. Queequeg plays the PRO's game for them by suggesting an analogy between our profession and theirs: they love to confuse the issue by the 'black sheep in every profession' argument. The fact Is that journalism is an honourable (and a necessary) profession, however many its black sheep, and how- ever black, whereas public relations is an unneces- sary and wasteful branch of huckstering, however Personally agreeable conic of its practitioners may be.
London, NJ
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