Welcome to this month’s 35 Debate, our monthly email dialogue in association with 35 Communications. This month – do PRs have a duty to tell the truth?:

Not necessarily, says Simon Goldsworthy, senior lecturer in Public Communication at the University of Westminster and co-author of ‘PR – A Persuasive Industry? Spin, Public Relations, and the Shaping of the Modern Media’. Yes, says Tamasin Cave, a freelance journalist and campaigner with SpinWatch, an organisation dedicated to monitoring PR and spin.

Hi Tamasin,
Telling lies may be a taboo, but it’s one most people frequently transgress. We’re ‘diplomatic’, or tell ‘white
lies’ to be polite and to serve our interests. PR’s ambiguous relationship with the truth is only an extension of this, and practitioners who gloss over this do PR no favours.

There are sound pragmatic reasons for Pr’s to tell the truth as often as they can. Failure to do so can backfire: when Greenpeace’s PR staff misled people about the Brent Spar in the 1990s they shot themselves in the foot because they were readily exposed.

However, PRs are paid not to be morally pure but to persuade people to behave in ways that serve their sponsor’s objectives. Presenting their sponsor in a favourable light is axiomatic. Newsworthy organisations that cheerfully confess to all the disputes, animosities and failures that beset them would trigger a media feeding frenzy, and the PR people who own up to everything would have short careers.

Governments, companies, charities – even universities – will forever present themselves as a little happier, more united, successful, and confident than they actually are. Sometimes this is a matter of opinion, but telling this slightly untrue story remains the lot of PR.
Yours,
Simon

Dear Simon,
As you say, lying can have consequences but this is no given. Take Shell. When it was found to be lying about the size of its reserves, £3 billion was wiped of it’s value. But it is allowed to continue to promote the lie that it is greening its operations despite substantial evidence to the contrary. (Oil sands as a “sustainable energy source”?) “Slightly untrue stories” can have consequences in public policy debates.

With no rules on ethics or transparency, it is left to individuals to decide whether they have a duty to tell the truth. Whistleblowers give lie to Upton Sinclair’s words: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Luckily, it’s getting easier to root out PR untruths – as the CBI found when an Information Tribunal ruled that there was a public interest in knowing the “exaggerated claims” it had been making to the government over the costs of environmental regulation. It’s legitimate for the CBI to defend business interests. Surely it’s better to play it straight?

Tamasin

Dear Tamasin,
I agree, but sometimes the truth is not so clear: not everyone agrees about sustainability, for example. As Pontius Pilate said, “What is truth?” As I write, amid the political turmoil following the European elections, many UK Cabinet ministers have come forward to praise Gordon Brown, while he has denied that he ever planned to sack his Chancellor.

Perhaps a few lies are being told, but no-one’s too surprised: if government spokespeople were to tell the nadorned truth it would bring many houses of cards crashing down. So notions of truth vary and most of us find some lies pardonable. Our society recognises this by sharply circumscribing the circumstances in which it’s illegal to lie. What can be done? A truth commission to determine who can and cannot practice PR? I think the attempt at a cure would be worse than the disease.

Simon

Dear Simon,
The unadorned truth has a way of coming out whether politicians choose to tell it or not. If the MPs’ expenses scandal has shown us anything, it’s that trying to conceal the receipted truth can end with a eputation car crash.

Anyone who has lied (that’s all of us) will find some lying pardonable but, we’re not talking about whether Brown has/had it in for Darling. What people are hacked off about is when we we’re lied to about the reasons for going to war. Or, if we’re talking about PR companies, Hill & Knowlton’s coaching of ‘Nurse Nariyah’ and her infamous incubator/dead babies lie in the run up to the first Gulf war. Or the new documents that show that Shell has consistently misled the public and its shareholders about the extent of
its relationship with the Nigerian military. Lying over the big stuff gets up a lot of people’s backs up.

What can be done? With Shell, it took this month’s potential court case for the facts/truth to start coming ut. The Freedom of Information Act is useful. We’ve also been campaigning for transparency regulations for lobbyists, which will allow the public to see who is lobbying whom and on what. It has the potential to make the government more accountable, making lying to the public harder. Is it so laughable that in the public sphere those who set out to mislead are deterred from doing so for fear of being punished. In principle, isn’t this what the ASA is supposed to do?

Tamasin

Dear Tamasin,
We’ve ended up agreeing that we all tell lies sometimes, which puts us at odds with some of the more po-faced and unthinking members of the PR community. But as our debate indicates, it will never be possible to agree about which lies are permissible. Tastes differ: what is “the big stuff”? If I were a  shareholder in a company I might like to know that the CEO wanted to sack the finance director. It may not matter to you, but we’re all shareholders in UK plc, and so, arguably, the potential firing of the chancellor was of consequence.

I’m less sure about effective policing of the truth. Improvements can be made, but I doubt if lobbying an ever be satisfactorily regulated. How can one ever monitor the thousands of relationships between outside
organisations and government? Few participants wear a badge saying ‘lobbyist’ and yet any may seek to shape government policy. The risk is that the process is drivenfurther underground. The ASA has the advantage of regulating discernible products – ads – whereas PR and lobbying remain much more nebulous, subtle and deniable.

Simon

Dear Simon,
To try to monitor all contacts between Government officials and those who seek to influence them would be absurd not to mention impossible. But realistic attempts to bring some transparency to these relationships have widespread support. You might expect Guardian readers to be in favour of greater openness, but a poll of 5,000 readers in June suggested that a register of lobbyists is supported more widely than any other kind of political reform – 98% of them saw sense in the idea. Perhaps surprisingly, many lobbyists do too. Why? Perhaps because of the damage inflicted by secrets and lies. There was a great example in the weekend papers. The Sunday Times featured yet another story about government attempts to hide the extent of the aviation industry’s lobbying over Heathrow expansion: the government’s now accused of misleading MPs by giving inaccurate replies to parliamentary questions about meetings between BERR and BAA. BERR will no doubt deny the charge, but will struggle to be believed, coming as it does on the back of many other stories about the public being misled over the case for a new runway. The consequence is an increase in public scepticism and protest, including custard attacks! It’s a narrative that doesn’t help anyone – the public, politicians or those in PR.
Yours,
Tamasin