Text 25 Mass media and pr

"News is what someone does not want you to print - the rest is advertising," Randolph Hearst

Mass media are tools for the transfer of information, concepts, and ideas to both general and specific audiences. The relationship between the news media and the PR industry is a complex and increasingly symbiotic one. The media is the central vehicle for much of the PR industry's messages. PR practitioners want to place their stories in the news or other publications and programmes. Without being able to do this, PR would lose one of its main avenues for communication with the public. The media in turn has become more dependent on PR to supply content to fill air time or column inches. Whilst newspapers have been steadily shedding staff over the last couple of decades they have simultaneously managed to produce ever thicker publications, and the ever growing ranks of PR are happy to help fill the pages. The power of the big agencies and spin doctor goes beyond this however. As the primary point of contact between businesses and the media, PR people can control access to information which journalists want. This gives them tremendous leverage in negotiating with journalists, as they are in a position to refuse information. Magazine editor, Mark Dowie, comments "even the most energetic reporters know that they have to be somewhat deferential in the presence of a powerful publicist. No one on a national beat can afford to get on the wrong side of a Frank Mackiewicz or a Harold Burson, knowing that their firms [Hill & Knowlton and Burson-Marsteller] together represent a third of the most quotable sources in the country."

One of the primary tools for supplying content to the media is the press release. This was invented as a PR tool by Ivy Lee. Ideally the press release will provide a publishable article that a over-worked (or lazy) journalist can publish with minimal effort. Anyone with much experience of press searching will have noticed how the same article can appear in several different publications under different names, with only minute changes. Newspapers acquire such content from press agencies such as Reuters or the Press Association which employ their own journalists, as well as from PR agencies and some intermediate services such as PR Newswire. One of the most alarming effects of the burgeoning PR industry's relationship with the media, is that it leads to a steady dumbing down of most news outlets. Today the media is dominated by big corporations. Few newspapers in Britain or America are not owned by a media corporation. And as the press has become more corporate so its emphasis has shifted from traditional news values - investigation and reporting - to market driven values - profitability, and maximising readership. Noam Chomsky suggests that the most important value for the modern press is to deliver audiences for their advertisers, who supply the bulk of revenue. Fewer journalists are employed and less and less time is available for investigation. Instead content is supplied ever more directly from the press release. Investigative journalism becomes rarer and is supplanted by source journalism. In this environment the PR companies have become a necessary crutch for the media, but not one that the media is keen to investigate and expose to the public, "like an alcoholic who can't believe he has a drinking problem, members of the press are too close to their own addiction to PR to realise there is anything wrong." The PR has not been quick in recognising the importance of the internet, but it is beginning to develop strategies for dealing with the new medium. Some of the key practices with which PR agencies aim to tackle the internet include, monitoring and intelligence of relevant internet sites and communications, and through 'viral marketing'.

The Bivings Group is a PR company that specialises in internet PR. Working out of offices in Washington D.C., Brussels and Tokyo, Bivings conducts its PR services for clients including Monsanto, Phillip Morris, and BP.

In 2001, when Californian scientists published a report in Nature, showing that Mexican maize had been contaminated by GM pollen that must have travelled over huge distances, it was a potential disaster for the biotech industry. However the two scientists were roundly and falsely condemned in their methods and political sympathies by correspondents to a biotech listserver, and in the resulting scandal Nature published a retraction of the article. Research revealed however that emails sent in by the two scientists' detractors originated on Bivings Group's servers. Bivings denied all knowledge.

Questions:

1. What is mass media?

2. What is the relationship between the news media and the PR industry?

3. What is the power of PR people in media?

4. What are the primary tools for supplying content to the media?

5. What was the invention of Ivy Lee?

6. What is the most alarming effects of the burgeoning PR industry's relationship with the media?

7. What does Noam Chomsky suggest?

8. Why has the press become more corporate?

9. What is the relation between PR and internet?

10. What is the activity of the Biving group?