Mr. Harry Browne:

I think I understand the Deputy's question. He is suggesting that, in a sense, the journalists can get more out of a PR because of what they have to offer, that, "No, you are going to have to give me more on that story, you are going to have to give me another angle, I need more information, because you are trying to get me to cover and I have potentially got three minutes on the news that I can do with this and if you want that three minutes you are going to have to give me more." Sure, of course, the relationship is clearly a two-way stream and, again, one does not have to go far beyond the precincts of these premises to understand how that kind of relationship can work. The PRs do not hold all the power.

There is a very good book about the recent history of American journalism by John Nichols and Robert McChesney called The Death and Life of American Journalism, I think, and it has a chart in the back that traces the employment in the PR industry and the employment in journalism from about 1980 to 2008. In 1980 the two bars are roughly equivalent. There are just about the same number of PRs working in America as there are journalists. As one moves through the 1980s and 1990s the PR bar keeps growing, the journalism bar wobbles and starts to shrink and by 2008 there are about three or four times as many PRs as journalists in the United States. That indicates to me a kind of a change in the ecology of this entire relationship and one in which the capacity of journalists to scrutinise the kind of information that is coming from this vast apparatus of public relations is weakened and the capacity of the PRs to kind of push information on journalists who have more and more that they have to try to deal with, contend with, and publish is strengthened. So although the Deputy is right in suggesting that the power clearly can work both ways and journalists do have what one might call currency in the transaction, they nonetheless find themselves, I think, increasingly on the less pleasant end of that transaction.