Tensions between Public Relations and the Press

“PR expands the public discourse, helps provide a wide assortment of news, and is essential in explaining the pluralism of our total communication system.”

JOHN C. MERRILL, MEDIA DEBATES, 1991

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In 1932, Stanley Walker, an editor at the New York Herald Tribune, identified public relations agents as “mass-mind molders, fronts, mouthpieces, chiselers, moochers, and special assistants to the president.”21 Walker added that newspapers and PR firms would always remain enemies, even if PR professionals adopted a code of ethics (which they did in the 1950s) to “take them out of the red-light district of human relations.”22 Walker’s tone captures the spirit of one of the most mutually dependent—and antagonistic—relationships in all of mass media.

Much of this antagonism, directed at public relations from the journalism profession, is historical. Journalists have long considered themselves part of a public service profession, but some regard PR as having emerged as a pseudo-profession created to distort the facts that reporters work hard to gather. Over time, reporters and editors developed the derogatory term flack to refer to a PR agent. The term, derived from the military word flak, meaning an antiaircraft artillery shell or a protective military jacket, symbolizes for journalists the protective barrier PR agents insert between their clients and the press. Today, the Associated Press manual for editors defines flack simply as “slang for press agent.” Yet this antagonism belies journalism’s dependence on public relations. Many editors, for instance, admit that more than half of their story ideas each day originate with PR people. In this section, we take a closer look at the relationship between journalism and public relations, which can be both adversarial and symbiotic.