Mr. Harry Browne:

I do it myself and have done it today but I am always suspicious of the line that in the old days we used to be so much better, hard-hitting and critical. The real change in the direction of the empowerment of PR is, as I outlined, the changing ecology of the information flow. PR is referred to as the enemy and there is talk of going to the dark side when journalists cross over to PR. It is one of the few acceptable ways within journalism for us to actually say we have this ethics element, we are not PR, we wear this badge called journalism which scrutinises information critically and just does not cut and paste it. Otherwise, journalists would sound self-righteous but at least we have PR to compare ourselves to. There is this very closely related industry that is somehow ethically different that we use as a way of flying our own flag.

The fact is that the access that PRs can control is very important to journalists. If one does not have that access and one’s rival in another publication does, then one’s editor will ask if one offended the PR. Some editors would be delighted one offended a potential source in some way and tell one to keep offending him. Other editors will say they would prefer if they had that story the other newspaper had.