Before I counterattack with some beef, we need to review the four definitions currently on offer. The definitions all presuppose (or purposely pretend) that PR is mostly concerned with managing relationships between an organisation’s stakeholders and publics. That was a misconception addressed in my recent post PR is more about messages than relationships. Anyway, here comes PRSA’s three proposed definitions in their full glory:

No. 1 

Public relations is the management function of researching, engaging, communicating, and collaborating with stakeholders in an ethical manner to build mutually beneficial relationships and achieve results. (Read the annotated version here.)

PS’s comment: this is a loose, slippery definition. How do you define, or who gets to define, what constitutes “collaborating ethically”? The words “mutually beneficial” are waffle because only one side pays our fee and we can’t represent both sides’ interests equally. There’s something anodyne about “mutually beneficial” because the perception of “mutual benefit” sustains relationships of all sorts. Moreover, every management function involves “engaging, communicating and collaborating with stakeholders” or it is not a management function. The words “achieve results” provoke the question: results for whom?

No. 2 

Public relations is a strategic communication process that develops and maintains mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their key publics.

PS’s comment: the logic of this definition is that if you are doing tactical and reactive PR you are not doing PR at all. Moreover, tough luck if you are not on the “key publics” list. Yeah, right. (Read the annotated version here.)

No. 3 

Public relations is the engagement between organizations and individuals to achieve mutual understanding and realize strategic goals. (Read the annotated version here.)

PS’s comment: What if your goals and those of your client are not strategic? How do you define strategic? As for individuals, they rarely relate to institutions strategically. Greenpeace might understand the nuclear industry and vice versa: so what?

Problems with PRSA’s method

What’s amusing about the three PRSA definitions is that they were the result of the collaborative work of hundreds of professionals who submitted their own definitions of public relations during a two-week crowd-sourcing phase. As the PRSA explains:

Working from a qualitative and quantitative analysis of this input, PRSA’s Definition of Public Relations Task Force proposed six possible definitions, which were circulated to our global partners. Based on their collective feedback, the three candidate definitions… emerged.

Attempting to define PR through crowd-sourced inputs is a recipe for producing confusion and compromise rather than clarity. The likelihood is that the blind will continue to lead the blind in the wrong direction. Indeed, the old saying about a camel being a horse designed by a committee springs to mind. Be that as it may, the process of deriving the proposed definitions is not my main concern: I’m more interested in the what than in the how.

What PRSA fails to grasp is that PR is a trade, not a profession. PR is not comparable to law, medicine, accounting or even to architecture. They have a specific body of knowledge to master in order to qualify and then professional bodies and codes to regulate practice backed by a legal framework.

Assessing CPRS’s definition of PR

Before I spell out the real role PR plays in the real world, let’s examine in some detail why the fourth definition from the CPRS is far from honest. CPRS’s definition, which they’ve adopted and others believe has universal validity, claims:

Public relations is the strategic management of relationships between an organization and its diverse publics, through the use of communication, to achieve understanding, realize organizational goals, and serve the public interest. (Flynn, Gregory & Valin, 2008)

This definition throws up a host of issues. First there is the question of whether our first duty as PR advisers is to our clients or to the public. Do we swear allegiance to both on equal terms even though it is our clients, rather than the public, which pay for our services? Would it be ethical to treat both responsibilities equally?

Proposition A (“realise organizational goals”) is scuppered by Proposition B (“and serve the public interest”), unless we are to have a rather strained oxymoron.

PRs are paid to promote the interests of their employers. They promote A within the bounds of decency and the law. They do this – if they do it properly – professionally in the best sense of the word. That is in the public interest (B) in the sense that having one-sided advocacy is a part of free society since freedom is not merely the right to speak but the understanding that truth and good sense emerge from competing arguments.

In other words, the defence advocate is serving the pubic interest almost whatever the merit of his or her client. Almost all the time, the PR’s job is to persuade the public that A equals B. But unless these two propositions are simply supposed to be coterminous (which is a stretch) there is often an important tension between propositions A and B. In reality, PRs have to favour A under the cover of espousing B.

The honest PR would admit that PRs dress up A as B. They would insist that his or her professionalism dictates that they should warn the public about the threat of “deception” (or at the very least, one-sidedness) which lies therein. This is why it is so unprofessional and sad and demeaning that PRs should (often do) pretend that A and B are always, or even should or must be, a good match.

It has always been a comfort to me and to colleagues that doing A is clearly defensible (within limits) and doable whilst achieving B is as hard to achieve as it is to define.

Public interest is hard to define

It is the impossibility of defining pubic interest (B) which has reinforced our civilisation’s conviction that lots of A (“realise organizational goals”), done competitively but within limits, is really the best way of achieving B. I say this in the spirit of how markets, democracies and debates are organised in the free world and how they actually behave in practice.

None of this is to deny that a PR may want to enrich an employer’s view of what A is, and do it by framing a view of B which could be promoted. A good example of this is corporate responsibility (CR) and a commitment to sustainability.

Hence, the honest PR needs to make a distinction between espousing B as an instrumental matter for pursuing A, and as a goal in its own right. He or she also must distinguish between pretending to know what B really is, and adopting a popular view of B, or a view of B which was plausible but also suited A.

Obviously the more B is bent out of shape so as to fit A the less the PR can claim a real moral power for his use of B, or for his employer as it claims to adopt B. Therein lies the accusation of greenwash and much more, as the rift between reality and practice produces a credibility gap.

It is my view that authenticity, truthfulness and being aligned with reality will nearly always and in the long run trump fluff, flannel and puff (spin) when it comes to winning long-term public trust; even if the case put is uncomfortable and unpopular. That’s to say: the long-term “organizational goals” will usually be best met with honest PR. With any luck, being honest will usually strike the public as having been in the public interest too.

The idea that PRs serves the public interest has rhetorical appeal precisely because it is a loose proposition. We all have our own wildly differing definitions of what it is; even if sometimes it is also clear to all (most) of us what it is not. In contrast, being honest – and prizing honesty – is a principle that has stood up pretty well over time.

That is why it may be best to leave the public interest out of it. The International Public Relations Association (IPRA) Gold Paper No: 6 seems on safer ground when it notes that:

‘[According to the Dutch PR association] Public relations is the systematic promotion of mutual understanding between an organisation and its public‘. Or, as the British express it: ‘Public relations is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its public’.

I have a fairly decent quibble with the British definition. To “maintain goodwill” might involve a good deal of deception or systematic lack of frankness. “Mutual understanding” has its attractions because to understand something includes the idea that what one is learning is not untrue. (The English language does not allow that one can “know” or “understand” an untruth.)

My view of what PR is about?

If forced to pick one word that captured the essence of public relations I would opt for “advocacy”: the act of pleading or arguing for something in the court of public opinion to influence an outcome on behalf of clients, preferably by using two-way communication techniques. That is to stress that I am not all that interested in PR which persuades people to think a certain thing unless the PR has invited and accepted and met informed challenge by the target audience. However, I’m not convinced that we could ever arrive at a “catch all” definition of our multi-faceted trade.

At the end of the day, PRs have to acknowledge that they are not in business to push their own varied agendas on to their clients. Rather they represent – advocate – their employers’ interests. PRs are more like barristers than priests. True, they can – like doctors or management consultants – help fix their employers’ problems. True, they can – like diplomats – bring the wider world to their employers and sensitise their employers to the wider world’s needs. Be they however sophisticated, flacks are hacks – they are for hire. That does not mean they leave decency or professionalism behind when they go to work.

Indeed, the definitions I recommend for them may be more rigorous and personally costly than swimming with the tide of fashionable nostrums, which is my beloved trade’s commonest activity right now.

(Apologies to regular readers of 21st Century PR Issues who might just recognise some of the text above, which originated here)

Recommended additional reading:

Heather Yaxley: Why I don’t care about defining public relations

PR Conversations: A defining moment for public relations

Stuart Bruce: Public relations defined for the 21st century

Please Revise…: “Defining” Public Relations 

21st-Century PR Issues: How PR sells firms and trust short

No related pages.

Health warning: get a cup of coffee or a glass of wine before you engage because this is not a typical blog post.

Its sections run as follows:

1. Introduction: Homer gives birth to humanism
2. From myth to the classic: the Greek transition
3. The Iliad and Odyssey gave man his voice
4. Women’s viewpoint was first heard in Sappho’s poetry
5. Homer led to theatre and theatre to art
6. How Homer’s disciples gave birth to PR
7.  Why Plato blamed Homer, Sappho, sophists, theatre and art for spin

1. Introduction: Homer gives birth to humanism 

Rhetoric came to life the moment mankind came together to cooperate. It was and is speech designed to influence others. Yet our story of the message only really begins with a discussion of Homer’s influence in archaic and Classical Greece. That is not because earlier civilisations failed to produce rhetoric that’s worthy of discussion. It is partly because the Greeks produced work which is so recognisable to us, and because they talk about their rhetorical developments so self-consciously. And one of the important developments is the idea that, with the Greeks, we see rhetoric becoming not merely the business of persuading people, but of having radically new ideas worth persuading them about.

According to historians such as C J Emlyn Jones and E H Gombrich, before Homer storytelling and art were not arenas in which ideas were explored so much as straitjackets that transmitted incontrovertible messages. Besides highlighting hunting grounds, battles, kings, queens and campaigns, their function was confined to conveying sacred themes about perceived truths concerning ancient or newly created myths, rituals, deities and magic.

However Homer’s period marked a new beginning for mankind. The key difference being that from around 800BC onward man began to acquire more freedom to manufacture and communicate messages that were open to interpretation and contestation. It was the moment when humanism was born:

Homer’s concern for human spiritual and social development in association with, but also sharply independent of, the gods – what may be termed humanism – separates Greek culture right from the beginning from the essentially god-centred and theologically motivated literature which was composed during the previous millennium in technically advanced but politically conservative cultures of the Near East, chiefly Mesopotamian, Hittite and Egyptian. [The Ionians and Hellenism: a study of the cultural achievement of early Greek inhabitants of Asia Minor, C J Emlyn Jones, page 61, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1988]

From then on the cultural and political agenda became more unpredictable and more dynamic than before as humanity sets out to query the will of the gods and question the nature of fate. This was an intellectual innovation that signified that man’s perception of his position in the world had shifted. As Jones points out:

…it was in Ionia, in the poetry of Homer and the cosmology of the Milesians, that for the first time in history, man took the centre of the stage as a thinking and feeling individual – an assumption upon which Western culture has subsequently rested. [The Ionians and Hellenism: a study of the cultural achievement of early Greek inhabitants of Asia Minor, C J Emlyn Jones, page 6, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1988]

We cannot be certain why it happened. Perhaps it was luck. More likely it had something to do with the fact that the Greek-speaking world allowed citizens more scope than previous civilisations to ponder, debate and decide upon social matters. But the genesis and the content and purpose of Homer’s ur-verse are the subject of controversy and mystery.

In his book Performing Homer, Gregory Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Literature at Harvard University, suggests that because Homer’s narratives were committed to memory and transmitted through an oral culture they were most likely reconfigured by performers over the course several hundreds years. In short, to keep performances relevant, Nagy says Homer’s content was continually adapted to accommodate the shifting needs of what he calls the polis of the audience. Certainly, there is no written copy of Homer’s work earlier than 600 BC (Jones page 88).

Be that as it may, nobody really knows whether the name Homer refers to a person or to an innovative period in storytelling and human development. We don’t even know if Homer’s supposed home in Ionia was an economically advanced or backward region of Greece. There’s so much uncertainty on so much detail that we should keep an open mind about the historical accounts we read. Nevertheless, here is a brief sketch of what scholars surmise to be true about the period, some bits of which are more rooted in verifiable fact than others.

2. From myth to the classic: the Greek transition

The period of Homer was one in which war and invasions and colonial expansion had undermined the coherence of the old world’s beliefs. This nascent civilisation was spread over a large area on the southern Balkan peninsula, the Aegean islands, coastal Asia Minor, and elsewhere around the Mediterranean and Black Sea coast. It was when and where the Phoenician alphabet was developed (though there’s no evidence that Homer had access to such knowledge). It was the period that introduced coinage and in which the population became more urbanised. There was also more freedom given to women than was granted during the Golden Age of Greek classical democracy three hundred or so years later.

Society was organised into a loose network of independent communities, which over the course of the next few centuries were to become city-states. They spanned two great cultural traditions: the more austere tradition of Greece, and Eastern flamboyance. Living in them were several tribes who had only recently intermingled, such as Mycenaeans composed of Achaeans, Argives and Danaans, and their northern opponents known as Dorians. There were numerous local customs, rituals and traditions within communities as well as between them. In essence, theirs was a cultural potpourri that shared a common language but no creed rooted in religion, principles and values. No region, community or tribe was capable of imposing its authority and outlook on the others. Even within communities there was such a precarious balance of power that only a measure of toleration made it possible to hold them together.

Kings ruled in most regions, but they were far from secure in their position. They relied for their legitimacy on the support of an aristocracy composed of a socially elite strata of wealthy, land-owning, educated families (but this was not a titled elite as existed in the Middle Ages in Europe). As the aristocracy grew in wealth and political influence they increasingly sought to break free from their kings and by around 750BC they finally ousted them.

Given the challenges that this disparate civilisation faced, the educated elite may have consciously devised a strategy to unite their vast realms or they may have stumbled upon one by accident. As we shall explore here, it is not difficult to imagine how they might have seized upon the potential of Homer’s persuasive messages to bring a semblance of coherence to their society.

While our knowledge of Homer’s time might be wanting, we know much about how subsequent generations from Classical Greece to the present have interpreted Homer’s legacy. It amounts to the founding myth of the civilisation which underpins our own. So, let’s examine Homer in that regard.

The newly installed aristocratic rule of Homer’s world faced serious challenges. During the 250 years it took the city-states to become democracies, yeoman farmers and other members of the rising middle classes, including merchants and manufacturers, regularly colluded with the military to replace oligarchical aristocratic rule with that of tyrants. But their downfall was paved partly by progressive policies that some tyrants pursued and partly by technical and social innovation:

The development of a disciplined heavy infantry (hoplites) gradually eroded the dominance of the cavalry and the aristocrats, whose power had come from their ability to afford horses. This forced leaders of a city state to field a well-trained phalanx of hoplites who had enough in common to be willing to stand together and fight, each protecting with his shield the sword arm of the man to the left. Leaders and their troops had to work together in the interests of the community as a whole, and there was no place for the individualism of an Achilles. [Early Greek political thought from Homer to the sophists, Michael Gagarin, Paul Woodruff, page xi, University Cambridge Press, 1995]

One of the best-known and most progressive of the tyrants was the poet and reformer Solon who ruled Athens with popular acclaim (638 – 558 BC). The legal rights that “law-givers” such as Solon granted came to be recognised as statutory rights worth preserving. This encouraged a sense of entitlement that eventually encouraged the masses to rebel against the arbitrariness of tyrants such as Hippias of Athens who in mid-reign switched from being a progressive reformer to a regressive dictator.

Hippias was finally ousted in 508BC by a popular uprising backed by Spartan soldiers. Afterward the polis invited the exiled leader Klisthenis back to take control. He transformed Athens by opening the government of the city to all its citizens so that they could create a representative democracy. This new society consisted of legislative bodies, including ten municipalities run by delegates chosen by lot, rather than by kinship or birthright. But the major decisions in this new creation were taken at the Ecclesia, the assembly and government of Athens. There every citizen was given the right to vote, for example, on the price of food, when to go to war, or whether to ostracize troublemakers who threatened to reintroduce tyranny.

Later in BC462, Ephialtes, mentor of Pericles, leader of Athens’ Golden Age of 462 to 429 BC, destroyed the last bastion of aristocratic privilege when he abolished the Court of Areopagus (appeal court) and transferred its duties to the People’s Court.

So as tyrannical, oligarchical and plutocratic rule gave way to democracy, ordinary citizens (exclusively male and never slaves or foreigners) from mostly non-aristocratic backgrounds became the major social and political power. They created a society in which there was a presumed equality of free men based on shared values and assumptions. Hence, it was during this period that the notion of equality under law was first acknowledged and enforced.

According to myth court-based forensic rhetoric originated a little earlier in 476BC in Syracuse, Scilly, when the tyrant Hieron I, the instigator of the secret police in Greece, died. In the turmoil that followed a small group of families formed a restrictive democracy. Their first challenge was to settle their disputes in judicial hearings about how to redistribute the land the king had supposedly taken by force. The story goes that because claimants pleaded on their own behalf in the newly created People’s Assembly, they sought the services of speechwriters (logographos in Greek) to enhance their chances of success. The legend says that to meet this need two professionals arose called Corax and Tsias.  It is claimed it was they who wrote the first textbooks on rhetoric. But none of their written work survives. Some scholars dispute that either character existed. Others say they were one person not two:

Hard facts about Corax and Tisias are almost entirely (some would say entirely) lacking.[1] The former is mentioned by Aristotle, the latter by Plato, and the fact is that a similar argument from likelihood (eikos) is attributed to Corax in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and to Tisias in [Plato’s] Phaedrus does not inspire confidence. [Background and Origins: Oratory and Rhetoric before the Sophists, Michael Gagarin, page 30, A Companion to Greek Rhetoric, Wiley-Blackwell, 2006]

It is said that as full democracy matured in Athens the masters of rhetoric from Syracuse moved to the mainland. That’s the history mixed with myth, now let’s take closer look at how Homer’s epics influenced developments.

3. The Iliad and Odessey gave man his voice

Today, Homer is remembered most for composing two great poetic epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which eulogise the exploits of orator warriors such as Achilles, Hector and Odysseus who fought in the Trojan War. The Iliad relates the story of the Achilles and to a lesser extent his opponent Hector. The Odyssey tells the tale of Odysseus’ journey home from the war. Together they provide an idealised vision of noble heroes, aristocratic virtues, such as honour and courage, and a concept of excellence which Homer’s contemporaries imagined embodied their civilisation’s long-lost Golden Era (circa: 1100/1200BC) when the Trojan Wars supposedly took place.

Caroline Alexander’s recent book, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War[2], highlights that the Iliad was the world’s first critique of war. She explains how it provides an account of the conflict that favours neither side. But perhaps more importantly it portrays its main characters as aspiring to master their fate in preference to remaining passive victims of the gods’ designs. Indeed, the characters in the Ilaid display a lust for life and a contempt for Hades, king of the underworld, god of death, that is quite inspiring.

The Iliad opens with Achilles, the mortal son of the goddess Thetis, ranting about how the nine-year-long war has cost countless lives. He asks king Agamemnon what drove the enemy to fight so hard. He reminds the king that no Trojan had done him or his men any real harm and adds that no prize in war is worth dying for. Angered by a dispute with the king over the spoils of war, Achilles says he’d rather go home than remain dishonoured in Troy. A little later the lowly bow-legged and lame soldier Thersites addresses the troops seemingly on Achilles’ behalf; though the narrator says Achilles hates him. Thersites denounces Agamemnon for being a coward. He declares boldly that a man committed to rape and rapine and living a life of luxury while his men live a destitute existence is not fit to lead the army. He urges his fellow soldiers to abandon their leaders and return home to their loved ones (Homer’s text has Thersites laughed at and beaten, Shakespeare made him the hero of Troilus & Cressida).

As the tale unfolds Achilles becomes increasingly consumed by the grievances he has with both sides of the battle. At the end, Achilles proves to be inflexible. He comes to terms with the tragic realisation that he will die as consequence of the pointless war against Troy; though he’s comforted by the conviction that his heroism will be remembered for eternity.

The Odyssey is more complex and less fatalistic than the Iliad. It tells how the multi-faceted Odysseus, king of Ithaca, uses deception, courage and intelligence to overcome every trial and tribulation on his ten-year-long journey home from the Trojan War to reclaim his kingdom and wife. So in love is Odysseus with his mortal wife Penelope that he remains faithful to her despite the sea goddess Calypso offering him immortality if only he would stay with her forever.

Among many other adventures he wrestles god-sent storms meant to kill him. He navigates his ship between two perilous rocks, where on one side sits Scylla, a six-headed monster, and on the other Charybdis, a sea-monster whose every gulp of water sets off deadly whirlpools. He blinds the one-eyed giant Cyclops, son of the gods Poseidon and Thoosa. His ship is sunk and his men killed when Zeus attacks them with thunderbolts. Yet somehow using lots of guile he makes it back to his homeland on the island of Ithaca. There with the help of his son Telemachus, he kills the greedy suitors of his faithful wife. Finally Odysseus is reunited with his family with whom we suppose he lives happily ever after.

Of course, Homer’s epics were not the world’s first. The stories of the Old Testament and The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world’s oldest known epic poems, predate Homer by perhaps thousands of years. Moreover as with Homer’s works their continued relevance owes much to their equally universal and enduring human themes.

The Epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of king Gilgamesh of Uruk, who is part mortal, and a greater part god. It recounts his quest to discover the secrets of eternal life so that he can become immortal. Along the way he realises that no man can possibly live forever. When he finally arrives back home he concludes that while the gods cannot be trusted, they have granted man something worth treasuring, which is the immortality of man’s achievements. The ageless message of the tale being that man must make the most of his time while he has it (and perhaps also that there is no place like home).

It is not the exploration of the meaning of life and death that sets Homer’s work apart. Neither are Homer’s epics different because of their accounts of the dysfunctional behaviour of the gods or for their exploration of love, friendship, family and sex. What gives Homer’s narratives their humanist content that tales such as The Epic of Gilgamesh lacked is more profound than that. According to the art historian E H Gombrich, Homer’s major innovation in storytelling was not only to tell the “what” in his accounts of mythical events but also the “how”:

Obviously this is not a very strict distinction. There can be no recital of events that does not include description of one kind or another, and nobody would claim that The Gilgamesh Epic or the Old Testament is devoid of vivid accounts. But there is still a difference in the way Homer presents the incidents in front of Troy, the very thoughts of the heroes, or the reaction of Hector’s small son, who takes fright from the plumes of his father’s helmet. The poet is here an eyewitness. If he were asked how he could know so exactly how it actually happened, he would still invoke the authority of the Muse who told him all and enabled his inner eye to see across the chasm of time. [Art and Illusion, A study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, E H Gombrich, page 129, Princeton University Press, 2000]

So however ambiguous this break with the past was, Homer was the first writer to draw the audience’s attention to the author’s narrative as a work of fiction. He’s the first to highlight the human nature of an epic’s messages. He’s the first to portray the main characters as being in many respects superior to the gods. This makes his epics truly groundbreaking.

Homer’s epics were admired for their advocacy of heroism, honour, nobility, cooperation and community values that characterized the popular culture of the Greek-speaking world. In Homer’s wake, a new wave of artists and thinkers sought the same licence to express their voice.

Muses in Raphael's Parnassus (1511)

4. Women’s viewpoint was first heard in Sappho’s poetry

After Homer’s epic poetry dominated oral verse, lyric poetry (from where we get the word lyrics) emerged in the seventh century BC. This innovation in poetic expression introduced musical verse accompanied by a lyre, backed by a choral choir that also danced. It was an artistic movement whose senior figure was Sappho, antiquity’s leading female poet.

In her masterful Rhetoric Retold, Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, Cheryl Glenn maintains that Sappho was regarded as being on the same level as Homer. She adds that Sappho is equal to any poet who has lived since then.

Sappho was an aesthetic poet with a light sensual touch who articulated Greek society’s interest in intimate and inward-looking thoughts of mortals. In contrast to Homer’s almost exclusive focus on male characters, she explored themes such as sex, love and beauty from the perspective of individual women. Cheryl Glenn sums it up thus, “the speaking subject of Sappho’s poems was a woman, a woman claiming the right to talk, the right to use her voice” (page 26).

Given that Sappho was neither banned nor condemned by the society of her day, it would seem that she was empowered by the polis of the Greek city-state of Lesbos to subvert stereotypes about the position of women in society.

For example, Sappho provides an alternative account to Homer’s Iliad about how Helen of Troy might have felt about her role in the Trojan War. Homer’s Helen cursed herself for abandoning her husband and coming to Troy; Sappho’s Helen is admired for desiring one thing, “the fairest,” and for choosing to realise her ambition by leaving her husband for Paris in Troy. Unlike in the Iliad, Sappho’s Helen is not a forlorn victim of a man’s world but an independent subject making moral and personal decisions about how she chooses to live her life.

Hence there were differences between the two poets that manifested themselves in a clash of ideas. On the one side, Homer promoted intelligence, courage, selfishness, self-control, moderation, lack of arrogance, hospitality and respect for gods, strangers, parents, justice and fairness. On the other, Sappho advocated surrendering one’s self to hedonistic ecstasy. She wrote sensually about love and beauty. She expressed her delight at seeing flowers being caressed by the slivery moonlight. She wrote about women who loved each other as much as they did men who looked like gods.

As the American scholar Ruth Scodel points out in Listening to Homer, Tradition, Narrative And Audience [page 175, University Michigan Press, 2002], contemporary classicists are less prepared today than they were during the 19^th century to see Homeric epics as historical sources. Instead they are more inclined to view them as ideological interventions (we shall explore in the section on the sophists how Greek ideology was weak and in need of mythological reinforcement) designed to influence contemporary opinions. In support of this viewpoint, Glenn quotes Germany’s leading classicist Werner Wilhelm Jaeger saying something similar about Sappho in his book Paideia [2nd edition, New York: Oxford, UP, 1943]:

[t]he very existence of Sappho’s circle assumes the educational conception of poetry which was accepted by the Greeks of her time; but the novelty and greatness of it is that through it women were admitted to a man’s world, and conquered that part of it to which they had a rightful claim. For it was a real conquest: it meant that women now took their part in serving the Muses and that this service blended with the process of forming character. (1: 133) [Rhetoric Retold, Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, Cherly Glenn, page 25, Southern Illinois University Press, 1997]

While Jaeger’s point is clearly convincing, that should not lead us to suppose that Sappho was a campaigner for equality. Not only is there no sign of that in her poetry, back then the concept of equality applied only to men who were members of the polis. The closest any writer of the time came to advocating equality was in Plato’s Republic. There he remarks that the physical and mental differences between the sexes are minimal. He says that in his ideal society there would be “equality” of opportunity in terms of work and education for women and men. But he makes no concession to his opinion that the souls of women are the reincarnated souls of cowardly and unrighteous men. Moreover, the absence of any modern notion of equal rights in Classical Greece is plain to see in the contemporary acceptance of slavery as being rooted in human nature.

Plato’s views appear relatively progressive when compared to the position of women at the time. In the city-states, including Athens and Sparta, women and men lived apart. Women were excluded from the polis, the ekklesia (principal assembly of the democracy) the Pan-Hellenic games and the oracular shrines of the Classical Greek world. Most scholars acknowledge, however, that women such as Sappho who were daughters and wives of citizens received a good education, though separately to men. The consensus also suggests that women played a major role at funerals, religious rituals and in the arts in Athens, particularly in the chorus, and that in Sparta they were encouraged to participate in athletics. [3]

There’s little doubt that Sappho’s influence was substantial, but Homer’s prestige clearly reigned supreme throughout archaic and Classical Greece. For example, Jaeger’s assessment of Homer cites no less a figure than Plato to stress the important part his epics played in the transmission of tradition in the ancient world:

Plato tells us that in his time many believed that Homer was the educator of all Greece. Since then, Homer’s influence has spread far beyond the frontiers of Hellas [Greece]….all his [Plato’s] attacks did not shake the supremacy of Homer. The Greeks always felt that the poet was in the broadest and deepest sense the educator of his people. [Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Volume 1, Werner Wilhelm Jaeger, page 34, Oxford University Press, 1939]

Of course, here Jaeger is also pointing out that Plato was a critic of Homer. Plato was not comfortable with the new freedom of expression artists were given. He believed they should have stuck to the prescribed paradigms set by the Egyptians and earlier civilisations. He thought that their artistic licence encouraged them to move away from the pursuit of truth-telling toward what we today call spinning, manipulation and outright deception. But before looking more closely at Plato’s arguments, we shall examine how Homer and Sappho influenced the wider world of messaging in the theatre and review the sophists.

5. Homer led to theatre and theatre to art

Theatrical performances in Classical Greece were major events attracting crowds well in excess of ten thousand at a time. They provided an experience, narrative and set of messages that all Greeks shared. In short, theatre was, as Homer had been and remained, a major force in the transmission and diffusion of common values, mores and beliefs throughout the Greek-speaking world. As John Richard Green writes in Theatre in ancient Greek society [Routledge, 1996] the popularity of Athenian drama and comedy outside Athens in the fourth century BC was probably the result of the universal, as opposed to parochial, appeal of their themes.

The theatrical era arguably began in Athens in BC534 when Thespis stepped in front of the chorus and created a role for himself to win the world’s first theatrical competition: ever since actors and actresses have been known as thespians. Later, writers produced innovative plays that gave roles to actors, supported by the chorus. In the sixth, fifth and fourth centuries they invented and developed the art of comedy, including its political form, satire, and they gave us the word tragedy, which means goats music in Greek. The era produced three great bards: Aeschylus (524 – 456BC); Sophocles (496 – 406BC) and Euripides (480 – 406BC). It was they who progressively transformed the world of theatre into its modern format.

Aeschylus is known as the father of tragedy and as the playwright who wrote parts for actors that went beyond liaising merely with the chorus. He put more characters into plays than his predecessors, which allowed him to explore how they interacted and conflicted with each other in his embellishments of themes derived from Homer’s epics. However, there were still only two actors on stage and the plots were kept comparatively simple. It was Sophocles who introduced the third actor that made possible the development of dramatic plot. His work increased the interaction between characters who identified themselves in numerous disguises with the aid of masks on stage. His plays included the ‘Freudian’ Oedipus Rex in which Oedipus unwittingly kills his father and unwittingly marries his mother with whom he conceives four children (when the truth is revealed he plucks out his own eyes). Euripides went further still than Sophocles in the development of both plot and characters. Euripides portrayed strong independent, intelligent women. He interrogated the gods and sometimes found their sense of justice wanting (this made him controversial). He explored the psychological motivations of the different characters. Significantly, in terms of style and content Euripides was naturalistic and humanist in a recognisably modern manner. For example, when Euripides wrote his own version of a well-told story about Orestes, a mythological character and subject-matter of several Greek plays, he gave it a contemporary tone that still resonates today:

…in earlier tellings of the story, Orestes killed his mother in pursuance of the unwritten laws of vendetta, but in Euripides’ play Orestes is castigated for not referring the matter to a democratic law court. A Modern society is superimposed on an ancient society based on codes of honour. In more subtle ways, all Greek tragedies observed the same principle, refracting the past through the present to make old stories generate an infinite number of new meanings. [Greek theatre performance: an introduction, David Wiles, page 11, Cambridge University Press, 2000]

It was the development of theatre after Homer and Sappho that perhaps did most to provide a licence for artists to put his or her directed message at the heart of their work. As playwrights produced more life-like drama they increasingly required the development of realistic scenery that could make the audience believe in the scenes they were witnessing. But this in turn required artists to experiment with the schemata of conceptual art because, as Gombrich explains, the more they began to embroider myths and to dwell on and illustrate the “how”of events, the more they were forced to accept that:

…in a narrative illustration, any distinction between the “what” and the “how” is impossible to maintain. The painting of the creation will not tell you, like the Holy Writ, only that “in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Whether he wants to or not, the pictorial artist has to include unintended information about the way God proceeded and, indeed, what God and the world “looked like” on the day of creation. [Art and Illusion, A study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, E H Gombrich, page 129, Princeton University Press, 2000]

This led the Greeks to do something no previous culture had seen the need to do: mimic reality (mimesis) by mastering perspective and modeling in light and shade to produce convincing illusions. The result was that Greek artists developed a fluid naturalistic style of painting, sculpture and other art forms that came to define their classical culture and later to inspire the Renaissance’s creative outburst. This was how the Greeks gave birth to the world of art as we know it today:

The creation of an imaginative realm led to acknowledgement of what we call “art” and the celebration of those rare spirits who could explore and extend that realm.

It may sound paradoxical to say the Greeks invented art, but from this point of view, it is a mere sober statement of fact. We rarely realize how much this concept owes to the heroic spirit of those discoverers who were active between 550 and 350 BC. [Art and Illusion, A study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, E H Gombrich, page 141, Princeton University Press, 2000

The driving-force of this revolution in art, however, was not a breakthrough in artistic technique, but a breakthrough in the world of ideas in epics, poetry, theatre and democracy expressed through rhetoric. Put another way, developments in artistic technique grew out of the world of ideas, not the other way round.

6. Homer’s disciples gave birth to PR

The sophists (from Greek for wisdom) emerged in the fifth century BC as an eclectic class of roving educators who passed on the techniques and power of persuasion to others. Their popularity reflected the demise in importance of birthrights, class and wealth as the main determinants of a person’s influence within the polis. Instead, in the new Greece influence and authority also depended upon how virtuous others perceived a person’s character to be and on how eloquently they performed in debates. The other great appeal of the sophists was that they had something interesting and original to contribute to public life at the level of ideas. So even though most of them were foreigners (not eligible for citizenship themselves) they flourished in Athens where they spent as much time managing their own image as they did those of others.

James Herrick remarks in A History and theory of rhetoric[4] that it was the sophists who demonstrated how there were at least two sides to every story and showed the world how to make democracy work by consciously putting contentious argument and competing opinions at its centre. Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff maintain[5] that it was the sophists who first gave Homer’s notion of the importance of procedural justice in communities theoretical support. Aristotle credits them with having invented the trade of speechmaking and passing on life-style “rules” known in Greek as arête that translates as something akin to excellence, which the Greeks saw as equating to virtue, as described in the Iliad and Odyssey. This claim of the sophists was controversial because previously virtue had been seen as an inherited quality that people couldn’t learn but only hone. Hence there was a widespread belief that the sophists were charlatans who preyed on the vulnerable by promising things they couldn’t deliver.

The sophists lived in an age in which oratory (public speaking) became the most valued social skill of all. So much so that the education system from the age of 14 focused almost exclusively on teaching the techniques and theories of oral expression. To meet society’s need for leaders who could persuade others, competing schools arose run by likes of Isocrates (the next chapter will examine these in detail). Their services, however, were often exceedingly expensive. This was, then, the age in which PR became a recognisable trade concerned with advocacy and managing reputations. But it was our trade at its most loftiest and most worldly. The rhetoric of the sophists brought politics, philosophy and PR to life simultaneously. For all practical intents and purposes they were inseparable in their hands. It took the theoretical work of Socrates, Isocrates, Plato and Aristotle to unbundled them by separating sophistry from philosophy, which is something we shall explore more in chapter 2.

Sophists – in the sense of those who practiced sophistry – thought that truth was inseparable from eloquence: arguably, they often mistook eloquence for the truth itself. They invented grammar and philology. They worshipped prose and the periodic structure (holding the main clause or its predicate until the end). They aligned words to express the “truth” rhythmically. They were the masters of the use of assonance, allegory, alliteration, simile and metaphor, and other pleasant sounds that enticed the ears to seduce the mind. In similar manner to the Renaissance thinkers of the 14^th to 17^th centuries Europe, they advocated living life to the full based on the quest for excellence in all human undertakings.

One of the leaders of the early school of sophists was Protagoras of Abdra (490 BC – 420) who started life as a porter, and who is remembered most for coining the humanist mantra, “man is the measure of all things”. He specialised in teaching “antilogik”, which involves arguing every side of an argument in debate in a balanced manner. However, his work Kataballontes (overthrowing arguments) describes strategies and techniques designed to make a desired outcome triumph using the art of persuasion. As a consequence, Protagoras was widely criticised for teaching people how to manipulate arguments so that the ones they favoured always trumped those that they opposed.

Another of the leading sophists was Gorgias. He believed that there were no universal values of right and wrong and that nothing existed (or at least that they could not be proved to exist objectively). He said if things did exist they could not be known. He added that if even if things could be known that knowledge could not be passed from one person to another. In his view truth was the product of debates in which diametrically opposed positions were reconciled in a particular circumstance. Truth in short, according to Gorgias, is something subjective that humans create linguistically through discourse (that sort of makes him the precursor and inspiration for post-modernism).

Gorgias thought that rhetoric was neutral and could be used for good or bad purposes on either side of any debate. He also believed in rhetoric’s supernatural powers, which could enchant audiences with hypnotic incantations and the magic of words. Gorgias maintained that rhetoric was capable of convincing virtually anyone of virtually anything. To prove this point, he showed his students how to defend Helen’s role in the Trojan War by claiming she was not responsible for abandoning king Menelaus and running off with Paris to Troy. Challenging Homer’s classic account in the Iliad, Gorgias gave four possible excuses for her actions: “it was the will of the gods; she was taken by force; she was seduced by words; or she was overcome by love.”

Such claims also resulted in him being denounced for his ability to make the weaker argument appear the stronger. He reinforced this view when he stated that all we know about reality “lies in the human psyche and its malleability and susceptibility to linguistic manipulation.” In other words, as modern PRs are prone to say (much too much for my liking), perception is reality.

However, the sophists’ proposition that there were many truths challenged the underpinnings of Greek democracy, which presupposed that some truths were immutable. In contrast, in so far as the sophists believed truth existed they mostly viewed it in terms of probabilities and likelihoods (Eikos in Greek) rather than absolutes. This difference of opinion was exasperated by the lack of clarity within the polis about exactly what truths were immutable. That is beyond the “obvious” concerning the position of women and slaves, and the hold of mythology over the collective imagination that manifested itself in the near-worship of Homeric heroes and the actual worship of the gods.

In practice the city-states of Classical Greece never had a strong ideology to guide their governments: there were an abundance of conflicting gods, no over-arching moral beliefs, no scared texts; besides Homer’s legacy, which acted as Classical Greece’s unifying cultural anchor. The majority opinion within the polis was determined by the majority vote in Athens of citizens and in Sparta by the votes of an elite strata guided by its complicated but quite robust constitutional rules which combined oligarchy with democracy (each of the many city-states was constituted differently). But the outcome of votes was often unpredictable. Athens in particular was prone to losing control of democracy to demagogues who appealed to the prejudices and emotions of the crowd.

The vagaries of Greek democracy, politics and beliefs left the sophists vulnerable to being accused of subversion for contradictory reasons: sometimes for their lack of reason and sometimes for their commitment to it. Socrates, for example, was a critic of the relativism of the sophists. He refused to accept money for his services. He condemned his rivals for their amoral views and for their lack of critical thinking in the pursuit of truth. But he was tried and condemned to death for subverting authority, corrupting the youth, and, among other things, for being an incorrigible sophist.

7. Why Plato blamed Homer, Sappho, sophists, theatre and art for spin

By now, we post moderns are feeling almost queasy with recognition. During the centuries of the Reformation, Renaissance and the The Englightenment, the world stayed fairly solid under our feet and in our heads. We could be fairly content with a rationalistic and materialist account of things. Gods and myths were available, but were increasingly kept for high days and holidays. Increasingly, however, the power of the imagination has been brought home to us until by now relativism, fuzzy logic, emotional intelligence, point of view, and a host of other agendas have led people to half suppose they live in a sort of dreamscape, or even a nightmare.

The School of Athens by Raphael (1509–1510), fresco at the Apostolic Palace, Vatican City.

This is why reading about Greek thinking is so exhilarating. The further we press on into a world of media and perception, the more we realise just how well-equipped we are by our Classical forebears. They seemed to have seen all the essentials of our dilemmas. And of course, we find Plato waiting for us, a bit stern sometimes, but cool, too, and seemingly determined that we hang on to the nuts and bolts of good sense.

Hundreds of years after Homer and possibly in the year of Gorgias’s death in 380BC, Plato objected to the change in the function of art, literature and rhetoric in the Republic. In the same year he also picked philosophical quarrel with poetry and art in Gorgias. Twenty years later in the Phaedrus, Plato went on to outline his parameters for practical philosophical rhetoric that’s also ethical (more on that book in chapter 2).

Voicing his objection in the Republic to the new freedom of expression society granted artists, Plato condemns them for introducing fakery and psychological tricks into their work. Above all, he blames Homer’s influence for corrupting the morals and character of the youth by popularising myths. He says in effect that Homer’s epics provided society with a poor role model by showing the gods in a humanist light that portrayed them as being unreliable, dishonest and quarrelsome; Plato believed in the goodness and sanctity of the gods. Plato also expresses his disapproval for the way in which people studied Homer’s works with a view to arranging their whole lives around them. He pointedly excludes Homer from his perfect and imaginary “noble state” (kallipolis) because it would be wrong to transmit the ethos of society through mythological poetry in a city-state governed by the exercise of reason.

Nevertheless, in the Republic Plato acknowledges Homer as Greece’s leading poet and in Anthologia Palantia, a work ascribed to Plato, he supposedly dubs Sappho the tenth muse, meaning that in his eyes she was virtually a god in her own right.

According to Plato, for all Homer’s talk of military commanders, medicine, navigation, agriculture, fishing and horsemanship, the author knew little about any of them. In a similar fashion the painter and sculptor knows little except about the appearance of the things that they represent. He argued that the more realistic their art appeared to be the more illusion their facsimile of a facsimile of a form needed to convey.

In his satirical work entitled Gorgias, Plato has his eponymous character Gorgias conduct a discussion with the imagined Socrates (we presume that Socrates was dead by then, but we can’t be certain) about rhetoric. There, Plato slams rhetoric as flattery, foul and ugly, all nous and deceit, based on a good knowledge of words. He says rhetoric is the counterpart to cookery and amounts to no more than kairos, which is about knowing what to say and when to say it.

In Gorgias Plato compares rhetoric to those things traditionally considered an art, such as medicine, politics, and warfare. He reasons that rhetoric, unlike true arts, is a methodology without a specific subject or any basic data to serve as the foundation for those who practice it. The subject of medicine is healing, he states, which is accomplished by knowledge of illnesses and medicines. In contrast, he says there is no need for a sophist (or PR) to know the truth of the actual matters being addressed. Hence he denounced sophists for advocating that one merely needs to have discovered some device of persuasion, which will make a person appear knowledgeable.

Plato was clearly annoyed by Gorgias’s views. He denounced Gorgias, saying that his rhetoric, “be it which it may, art or mere artless empirical knack – must not, if we can help it, strike root in our society.” He believed, in contrast, that there were absolute truths to be sought as well as universal principles of right and wrong.

So, Plato frowned upon Homer’s epics and the licences it gave to artists to mess with messages and to invent narratives. He disapproved of the other innovations in artistic technique it encouraged. He believed that poets, playwrights, actors and other artists couldn’t recreate reality but only things that resembled it. He argued that socially constructed messages cast a spell on people that made them lose sight of reality. Hence Plato denounced the new art forms for making most of us, as opposed to the philosophical elite, susceptible to being bewitched by impressions (that’s a very contemporary concern).

Plato was rebelling against mimicry, tricky and the illusion of matching things in ways that made them look real. He was rebelling against what he saw as the corruption of character and morals by sophists and art during what was perhaps the most creative moment in human history. It was a period in which he played a major role and left a lasting intellectual legacy. His reputation as a thinker has survived because he touched on some truths and had some insights that are still valid: the appearance of things is not the same as the real thing.

Greece’s Golden Age in the fourth and fifth centuries was one of free expression and the creation of democracy. It was at that time that rhetoric was taught and practiced as it never had been before. This was a time of philosophic and scientific enquiry. It was a time when ideas became subject to proper interrogation: it was the world’s first Enlightenment. It still marks the moment against which all subsequent epochs have measured themselves.

In the next chapter I shall examine the development of systematised theoretical rhetoric in the thinking of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Isocrates (including their disputes). I will also sketch the anatomy of rhetoric that still governs communication and in particular PR today; however hidden its hand might be.

[5] Early Greek political thought from Homer to the sophists, Michael Gagarin, Paul Woodruff, page x, University Cambridge Press, 1995

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In a letter to the FT last week, she criticises PRs who worked for Col Gaddafi and any who wouldn’t mind working for Iran. Setting out her own ideas, Fiske gets into a muddle and contradicts herself without shame or perhaps without realising it:

We [Public Relations Society of America] believe every person or organisation has the right to have its voice heard in the global marketplace of ideas. But for PR firms to represent dictatorships that do not afford that same freedom to their own people is disingenuous towards the liberties of a democracy and to democratic societies’ reputations as marketplaces for dissenting ideas.

Well, she can’t have it both ways. Either everybody has a right to a PR advocate, or they don’t. Her position, if we take what she says seriously, is that only people who run their countries according to the same democratic principles as the United States deserve PR counsel from the Western world. Moreover, Fiske writes in her letter:

Ethical public relations places an emphasis on counselling reputable organisations and individuals in developing and maintaining beneficial relationships with concerned stakeholders.

Nice work if you can get it.

Leave aside for the moment that Fiske is positioning the PR industry as the arbiter – which we are not qualified to be – of which person and organisation or country is “reputable” or what stakeholders are “concerned”.

Surely, the point of some very important PR is that it helps people who are considered (or may self-evidently be) unreputable. If they were of good reputation, they’d have scant need of our work. Oil companies need a lot of PR when their pipes and ships leak. Tobacco companies presumably need good PR all the time. (See Thank You For Smoking.) Ditto, professional downsizers. (See Up in the Air.) You get the picture.

The point isn’t that so-called sinners should be denied PR. Surely it is: what class of rogue is so utterly roguish that PRs shouldn’t take their money? Of course, we all have our limits, but they’ll likely be different.

A moment’s thought suggests that famous, outed, seemingly obvious rogues have a strong claim to PR’s efforts. They are the targets of huge, prejudiced, tediously liberal, right-on attacks, which are often unjustified. Why shouldn’t they have a defence? Besides, such media “victims” come with a huge risk for PRs, and that makes defending them an act of some courage, and therefore of some merit on those grounds alone.

I can easily imagine why for selfish reasons most PR agencies might reject Col Gaddafi’s reputed two million pounds sterling to launch a belated lobbying campaign against NATO. They would be right, I suspect, to assume the contract would do their reputations more harm than it would do his any good. Though if anybody does take the job, they should not be condemned by fellow PRs living in glass houses. (See PR Week).

There are far murkier waters than these, though. What about the covert-rogue? That’s the one who has a good and undeserved reputation and employs PRs to keep it that way. Is that acceptable work for a PR? The answer depends in part on how nasty the rascal is and how much the PR knows. (See “Deadly Spin” is mere spin.)

It is no good for PRs to argue that they don’t have to be any more picky than a defence lawyer. While courts of law might be symmetrical, the court of public opinion seldom is. In reality, the balance of opinion and media coverage is often tipped unfairly against clients. Hence we rightly assume the prosecution is competent and well-resourced: its best shot is likely to be pretty good and merits as good a response as is available. (See A new moral agenda for PR.)

It seems pretty obvious that Ms Fiske’s position is obviously way too saintly. She suggests that even if the US government was working in the past to repair relations with Libya and Syria, American public relations firms should have cold-shouldered them. Her qualification for our endorsement appears to be “people like us”. But that would exclude Saudi Arabia, China and Russia and many other countries in which PR is booming.

Of course, one could argue that in China PR firms mostly represent Chinese companies, rather than the state. Except that would be dishonest. In China the state owns most major companies and still commands the economy. It also gets its claws, admittedly indirectly, into the Western firms which operate there. (See Google comes of age in China.)

Ms Fiske works for the Public Relations Society of America. I imagine that it would like PR to be a respectable profession. Presumably its members believe that obeying a rather strict code is good in itself or good for business or both. I am interested in the merits of that sort of scheme. (See: When “friends” fallout over “dirty tricks”.) But I also admire the PR firms that say they don’t want to be part of the public relations industry’s hypocrisy.

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Vision 2050 advocates that big business solves mankind’s major social and environmental problems in partnerships with government and society. The aim is to produce enough food, clean water, sanitation, shelter, mobility, education and health to provide for 9 billion humans.

Here’s some of what they think needs doing over the next forty years to make a sustainable planetary society possible:

“These include incorporating the costs of externalities, starting with carbon, ecosystem services and water, into the structure of the marketplace; doubling agricultural output without increasing the amount of land or water used; halting deforestation and increasing yields from planted forests: halving carbon emissions worldwide (based on 2005 levels) by 2050 through a shift to low-carbon energy systems and improved demand-side energy efficiency, and providing universal access to low-carbon mobility.”

The WBCSD explains that:

“As part of this transformation, Vision 2050 calls for a new agenda for business: to work with government and society worldwide to transform markets and competition. New rules for markets will reframe environmental challenges as economic challenges, driving innovation and competition in the direction of sustainability and away from resource- and energy-intensive production. Rationalizing prices to include such externalities as climate and biodiversity impacts will make corporate environmental efficiency a true competitive advantage across all industries and regions.”

How to interrogate this stuff from an independent PR perspective? Sceptically, I suggest.

Big business likes this stuff because it sounds and even is virtuous. It has the merit of turning all kinds of uncertainties into market opportunities. I certainly warm to Vision 2050′s commitment to raising productivity (output) by improving land usage and making better use of genetically modified organisms. I can also see the logic of accepting political realities and in proactively helping governments turn costly externalities into profit-centres.

It’s worth noting, though, that this means that externalities and social desirables become goods and services which have a state-subsidy or state guaranteed price.

The problem is that state planning risks making the future of the world dependent on the short-term political thinking politicians are prone toward, which is the very opposite of what Vision 2050 aims to achieve. Certainly, WBCSD hopes that governments will map the paths to achieve pre-advertised and pre-announced priced services (the ex-externalities), which is something that may or may not happen.

Yet, when the state is required to map out the big things it wants to happen, won’t it be natural (as the WBCSD knows well) that big firms will be able to gear up to deliver it quicker and better than small firms? Won’t government find itself talking with the big firms which can deliver big stuff?

For instance, BP may have cocked-up in the Gulf of Mexico, but a small firm couldn’t have even begun to get the deal. If you electrify cars, the trains, build new track, put in huge windfarms or solar arrays, deliver new low-pollution chemical plants etc, etc, almost all the sustainability deliverables get delivered quicker by giant firms. So the big problem-makers become the big problem-solvers. Yummy. Trebles all round. And a PR victory to boot, you would think. Perhaps, says I, but it is a short term and limited one. Here’s why.

Vision 2050 assumes that in the future the world will have to cutback on carbon dioxide usage to combat global warming. However, what if we could either suck the carbon from the atmosphere or clean it up effectively as we go at little cost? With the former solution we could turn-reverse global warming and keep using fossil fuels. With the latter solution we could make use of all the fossil fuel resources we desire for as long as they are available without making AGW any worse than it already is (evidence suggests there are still huge reserves of gas, oil and coal waiting to be exploited).

Moreover, if the nuclear fusion technology comes on tap in the next 40 years then our energy usage could increase in intensity almost without limit forever. Energy production might remain centralized with the emergence of fusion. It would also make desalination possible on a grand scale; ending all worries about water shortages in a world that is two thirds covered by oceans. We already know how to build gas pipelines over distances of thousands of miles to deliver energy to our homes, so building a global water-pipe network should not be beyond us (something states might legislate for but might not pay for; while the market might be able to sustain the entire costs because it is profitable to do so).

By making best use of nuclear fission, solar and wind technology, this might facilitate the trend toward greater decentralized energy provision that environmentalists demand and Vision 2010 supposes: that is until fusion  - or something else – replaces them all (again subsidies might help, and they might not, and special pleading might not be attractive to taxpayers either).

My point is not to favour this or that solution over some other possible solution. My point is that innovation creates new industries, new possibilities and paradigms. Another issue is that the WBCSD Vision 2050 is in the business of envisioning. In that regard, I accept that the BCSD has identified all sorts of problems which are up ahead, and it may be right that government has a role in fixing them, helped by big business. My concern is only that we should be careful when big business signs up for a green agenda, but only because it’s neat and now it suits them.

Regardless, they may still be right. But I suspect they’d be quick to argue, whatever the reality was, for legislation, controls etc, which make their life more mappable. That doesn’t make them wrong, but it takes away some of their virtue, which they so boldly lay claim to. In any case, they may – as I fear – wrap us in all sorts of expensive taxpayer action which turns out misguided and which leads to its own backlash that undermines their credibility and reputations for honesty, integrity and insight.

The future is almost certainly unpredictable. And perhaps my most important point of all is that we should instead be encouraging new risk-takers to emerge to solve today’s and tomorrow’s problems. Such risk takers are as likely as not to be competitors to today’s major solution providers. They will make best use of scientific and technological breakthroughs to challenge the existing order. Such innovation and innovators rarely emerge from partnership relationships (cosy clubs) but unfold as the work of disruptive entrepreneurs, as the railways, automobile, IT, internet and bio-pharmaceutical industries did.

Vision 2050 does have PR potential, certainly for spin. It also has potential for making progressive progress through the promotion of partnerships, even if its difficult to know in which field. What grates on me is the self-interested certainty that is embedded in the content and tone of Vision 2050. At the very least I counsel that however well intentioned Vision 2050 is, I don’t think it is a sustainable plan over the next 40 years given the nature of the unknown unknowns – such as politics, serendipity and competition – that are as likely as not to tear the plan’s assumptions to shreds.

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As the three companies faced their interrogators, behind sat protesters wearing T-shirts embossed “Energy shouldn’t cost lives”. When the proceedings closed the protesters screamed at the BP spokesman, “Hey, Hey, Lamar MacKay, how many fish did you kill today?” They chanted “Boycott BP”. They seemed to have friends in the Senate. Bob Menendez, the Democratic senator from New Jersey said:

“We were told that the Titanic was so technologically advanced that it couldn’t sink, and we were told that this well was so technologically advanced that it couldn’t spill. Unfortunately both of these technological marvels ended in tragedy.”

Actually, nobody ever said that either accident couldn’t happen. Though the makers of the Titanic and BP both at some point understated the potential risk involved in their respective challenges. That’s all the more reason, I believe, for BP to use this latest incident to set the record straight with the public about the realities of its business.

But right now the White House has vowed to “keep a boot to the throat” of BP. That’s an understandable response while the oil flows unchecked from the seabed. That does not mean that either PRs or BP should see it that way.

However, PR dogma suggests that BP should bite its tongue. The PR rulebook, designed to maintain a licence to operate, opines that if people think BP’s the villain it should act like one. Larry Smith of the Institute for Crisis Management and Timothy Coombs of Eastern Illinois University advocated this viewpoint to Slate:

[It's] literally true: BP owns the oil but not the rig. But it’s a shoddy communications strategy, says Smith. Wherever the fault lies, BP shouldn’t be splitting hairs. Companies should take the fall and work out recriminations behind closed doors, says Coombs. For example, when the chain Taco Johns had an E. coli outbreak, it didn’t publicly blame the lettuce supplier. It took responsibility. And, of course, sued the lettuce supplier later.

Effectively, Coombs is arguing that BP should adopt a cynical strategy in which it says one thing in private and another in public. His logic – and that of most PRs – is that the truth is too nuanced and complex for the public to comprehend. The argument goes that perception is everything. As the WSJ explained, they’ve got a point:

When you consider that analysts’ worst case scenarios put the eventual cost to BP at around $8 billion, yet $30 billion has been wiped off the company’s market capitalization since the crisis began, it becomes clear that this reputational damage has a value.

The problem is that by accepting full responsibility for the accident, BP would promote itself (dishonestly) as incompetent. How would that help maintain its credibility and reputation? Hence, I much prefer BP chief executive Tony Hayward’s strategy of accepting full responsibility for cleaning up the mess caused by its oil, while quietly but firmly disputing that it caused or was responsible for the accident. But Malcolm Gooderham, MD, TLG Communications, dubbed Hayward’s approach a “Miss” in PR Week. He also contrasted Hayward’s stance to that of his predecessor, Lord Browne:

“The virtue of Browne’s tenure was that despite the disasters, he is revered because of his strategic achievements. The challenge for BP today is to define a new thought leadership agenda.”

Browne’s thought leadership led him to re-brand British Petroleum as Beyond Petroleum. It was deceptive positioning and slightly bonkers to boot. To his credit, when Hayward took control of BP, he quietly downgraded the tag-line’s prominence. It now merely serves as “shorthand for what we do”, which is petroleum, and it hardly features at all in BP’s PR. What’s more, the irony of BP’s current plight is that it follows Mr Hayward’s determination to re-oritentate itself on technological competence rather than geo-political flair.

So what’s my advice to BP today?

• BP should concentrate on proving itself committed and competent as it cleans up the mess and reconsiders safety strategies
• BP has to speak with one voice in public and in private, now and in the future
• BP should use this crisis to educate the media, public and political elite about the realities of complex accountability
• BP should seek to lay the blame wherever the facts take them, even if some more of it falls on them
• BP should remind the world that energy is bottled force; BP is as good as any in handling the hazards involved in fueling our world
• BP should state the Browne years of Texas and Alaska lapses are behind them and what happened in the Gulf of Mexico was not caused by the same internal flaws
• BP needs to stress that the oil that’s now being drilled is located in inhospitable conditions and has inescapable risks
• BP should repeat and repeat that whatever lessons can be learned will be learned and that no stone will be left unturned in discovering them.

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When the election started David Cameron’s Tories looked like they were cruising to some sort of nuanced victory. The first televised leaders’ debate put paid even to that. The Liberal Democrats jumped from a distant third to being front runner or in close second place, depending on which poll you trust. So-called Cleggmania was born. Now some sort of humiliation looks much more likely than it did, even if Cameron becomes PM.

Of course, the leaders’ debate is game-show politics, which makes it even more prone to febrile moodiness than EU or local elections. I agree with my friend Richard D North’s view (expressed on his blog and in his book on Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics) that we may well be watching the end of 20th Century class politics. Why wouldn’t it get weird? But interestingly, the running is still being made by ordinary newspapers and broadcasters. Who said TV was dying or that dead tree press is dead? One wonders how Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis explain such events.

Once upon a time, political parties had a mass base, with mass membership, rooted in trade unions, social classes and local constituencies. Not any more. Today the political elite is remote and connects to the masses via the media. The contest for votes is fought on TV and in the tabloids and broadsheets, sometimes in the style of the X-Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and American Idol. Modern elections are always more about style than content, but I don’t think the real intentions of the major parties were ever more obscure to us than they are today.

Supposedly we live in an age of engagement, in an age in which we form interactive online social networks based on common values. But that doesn’t fit well with the British election experience. Social media – Twitter, Facebook and blogs – are just a backdrop to this story. Charlie Beckett summed up the TV-impact well:

…the curious voter can watch the debates and form their own judgements on the basis of what the candidates say and how they perform.This kind of ‘disintermediated’ communication is usually thought of as an Internet phenomenon. But as Michael Cockerill’s excellent documentary on the history of TV debates reminded us – mainstream broadcast media can do it, too, albeit without interactivity.

Moreover, the political party with by far the largest web-based social presence, with the most interactive website, has the least influence of all on public opinion. The British National Party is a joke (though it might win a seat; we’ll see). But according to the web-rankings agency Alexa the BNP is the world’s 28,545 most popular site compared to the Conservatives at 52,423, Lib Dems at 68,446, Labour at 69,527 and political blogging sensation Guido Fawkes at 40,688.

There’s lessons here for firms. Old media still counts for much more than new media. However new media and old media interconnect so both need to be engaged. But it’s largely a myth that the online networked society changes the rules of PR and communication in general. By the way, I shall deal with the advocates of the Stockholm Accords’ misreading of contemporary developments (they think we live in a new value-network society) at a later date. For now I merely remark that in many ways they miss the obvious: the emergence of new media, and the fragmentation it encourages, makes old media more important than ever, even as their audience shrinks, precisely because the mass public is increasingly disengaged from public life.

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As somebody who once was accused of organising a race riot in Handsworth, Birmingham, I know something about definitions.

My first defence was to say that if it was organised, it was not a riot. The police perhaps kindly ignored that challenging thought and moved on to my second line, and accepted it: I was attending a conference in London when it happened.

But I digress. Here’s some examples of some crises.

When Edward VIII abdicated from the British throne in 1936 so that he could marry his American lover Wallis Simpson, it created a crisis. It did so because it threatened the nation’s sense of itself and might even have wobbled the UK’s constitution. The credit crunch was a crisis. It threatened to very severely disrupt capitalism by destroying huge amounts of wealth (especially savings) and confidence. Note: what actually happened was very nasty but has so far fallen well short of what was threatened. So it was a crisis and we seem to have got through it.

Those events threatened abrupt or decisive change. They created very real and deep fear. The worst outcomes were seriously in play, and did not materialise.

There are, of course, cases where dramas needlessly become full-blown crises.

For example, there are the cases where people imagine a danger which would be dreadful if it did occur. One was Three Mile Island in 1979. The ironic thing about Three Mile Island was that the worst case scenario core meltdown occurred within the first minutes of the accident. It was such a non-event that nobody noticed, not even the plant’s operators. Meanwhile, the world’s media stood outside the plant for weeks hyping up the “what ifs”. (BTW: Three Mile Island still generates electricity today, just as electricity was generated by Chernobyl’s nuclear reactors until very recently.)

Here’s another twist. Disasters are quite often not crises. That’s to say, a chaos is unleashed, but nothing very much is threatened. When Richard Branson interrupted his holiday to fly to the scene of a Cumbrian train crash in 2007, that was not crisis management, so much as good PR and (for all we know) a compassionate act of a good boss responding to a disaster. Of course, if Branson hadn’t turned up, and was thought callous, that might have produced a drama for Virgin, since one cannot afford nowadays to be invisible at such moments. Even so, it would not have been a crisis.

Interestingly, when it comes to accidents, firms rarely get punished as hard as did Windscale, Value Jet, and Union Carbide, all of which anyway survived their genuine crises. Yet it is at least possible that rebranding a disaster or crisis-hit organisation merely produces a legacy of bad-taste jokes and ill-feeling about slippery PR. That’s to say, there may be a deep understanding among the public that accidents do happen. That understanding can withstand, I maintain, the media approach (and victim reproach) which tend to assume that total safety is available and would have been achieved except for the villainy of firms and governments.

As people speculate about Toyota’s fate, the fact is that there’s never been a major car firm destroyed by a recall or by an accident. Companies destroyed by sudden events are normally in the class of totally corrupt Enron and its grey accomplice Arthur Andersen. In both companies trust collapsed because their skulduggery accurately defined what their brands were about. Their reputations were beyond repair, and quite rightly so.

Then there’s the likes of Ratners. The collapse of that company had more to do with a loss of nerve in response to a gaffe than, arguably, necessity dictated. But Ratners’ experience was another exception that stands out precisely for that reason. If you doubt that, just look at the positive share prices of oil companies today and then review their accident-prone histories.

But let’s stay contemporary here. Toyota’s worldwide recall is not a crisis in the true sense of the term. It is actually a drama focused on a narrow range of issues. The chances are slim that it will become a long-term disaster for Toyota. That’s not to say that slow sales, halted production lines and global recalls of millions of cars is business as usual. It is just to remind us to retain a sense of perspective.

For a start, who’s panicking? Who thinks their Toyota (their car, their share, their job) is really threatened here? Here’s the important thought: we see this storm and we think, “Toyota’s a damn good car-maker and will be an even better one after this”. Maybe a few victims (some half-embarrassed that they panicked instead of finding neutral), with their US lawyers rubbing their hands behind them. But I don’t think anyone seriously believes that Toyota’s existence is threatened by its current problems. Though I imagine that the pressure must be bloody uncomfortable for Toyota’s bosses, and not good for the nerves of Japan’s stock exchange in the midst of recession.

Before we lose our nerve, or tell Toyota to, we should remind ourselves how well Ford survived its tribulations with its “exploding” fuel tanks in the Pinto and Mercury Bobcats (1.5 vehicle recall). It was claimed they killed 27 people. Ford ordered the recall – and did not contest the accusations – because it was more motivated by supposed public perception than by what it knew to be true (The Suicidal Corporation: How Big Business Fails America, by Paul H Weaver, a Touch Stone Book).

So most things labeled as being a crises aren’t any such thing.

We PRs need to consider very carefully whether we should avoid the elephant trap which is laid for us here. We should perhaps develop a determination to avoid reacting to every drama and panic and even disaster as though it were a crisis for our clients. The media, after all, is in the business of making a crisis out of drama, and we all too often risk doing half their work for them.

Heather Yaxley writing on PR Conversations hit the notes well recently. She attacked PR crisis management theorists for their panicky hyper-active overreaction to dramas:

Tell it fast becomes tell it before you know anything.  Tell it all means let the media and its rent-a-quote experts speculate about worst case scenarios.  Be open means unlimited social media engagement (regardless of what the legal or other ramifications may be). Have the CEO (or celebrity if a personal faux pas has occurred) lead communications with mandatory appearances on chatshows, a tour of news stations,  and a YouTube apology.  Mea culpa – the universal panacea: “I’m sorry if…” – anyone resisting the calls is bullied until they comply.  The pound of flesh must be paid.

I fear she rightly roughs me up a little for my recent piece Where was Mr Toyoda yesterday? She certainly compellingly argues that every so-called crisis is different. She adds that too many PRs try to impose commoditized crisis management plans onto unique situations:

It’s a comfort blanket of how to…, what not to do…, common mistakes and miracle cures.

I would add that PRs often corrupt the everyday management of risk in business. The sensible cry from PRs for clients to stay ahead of the game risks turning the commonsense desire to spot problems before they occur into crisis management paranoia.

The result is the creation of a risk-adverse culture which inhibits innovation. That’s a point that is well argued in Paul H. Weaver’s The Suicidal Corporation. It is why I’m recommending people read it. The creation of a risk-adverse culture helps spread indecision and insecurity. During media hurricanes it becomes a sort of PR own goal. In other words, making decisions under under pressure calls for risk-taking, but risk-taking like winning and losing is habit forming.

The truth is that people admire and respect risk-takers and they make allowances for their failures. Moreover, unpopularity in the media is just as temporary and superficial as popularity. Bad headlines don’t destroy good reputations, no more than positive ones make them. Good reputations are based on innovation, delivery on promises and a certain arrogance based on success. They are sustained by people’s experience of the brand  (El Buli, Ryanair, Apple, Toyota and much more).

Hence, rather than becoming hyper-active advocates of risk-aversion, PRs should instead do more to inspire courage and balls into the mindset of their clients. PRs could do much more to push back on media and other agendas and to help their clients ride out the storms they face with their integrity intact.

The reassuring lesson from most Toyota-type troubles is that consumers are as quick to forgive as they are to condemn. So I’ll risk a prediction. There’s every chance, as Insigna’s Jonathan Hemus says here in The Guardian, that Toyota will come out of its storm with its reputation enhanced (though his advice is too skewed toward institutionalized risk aversion for my liking).

So a crisis is a crisis when it threatens the viability of something or other. Otherwise it doesn’t qualify. The job of PRs is to make sure situations never do qualify or to clear up the mess if the you know what hits the fan.

Oh, I never did advocate that people riot, dread the thought. But I do own up to having been a revolutionary, which is something completely different.

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At the moment we a have a theatrical clash of positions. It goes something like this. The Finnish reactor currently being built – which is an example of the type the UK hopes to build – is already three years behind schedule and 3bn euros (£2.71bn) over budget. So what hope a UK nuclear programme being timely or affordable? Ah, responds the UK’s Nuclear Industry Association (NIA):

“The industry is confident that we can have the first new stations operating in the UK by the end of 2017. The UK’s innovative approach of full design assessment prior to any construction means that we will avoid many of the delays which can be seen elsewhere in the world”.

Then up pops the British regulator, Kevin Allars of the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII),  to say he’s every bit as tough as his colleagues in Finland (not that he’s saying regulatory success equals delay) and, just to prove his point, agrees there’s never been a reactor built to time or budget in the UK.

The truth is that neither the regulator nor the industry has a helpful position. Neither does anything to enhance the reputation of the industry or to advance its case in the public domain. Rather they do much to knock the industry’s credibility and to bewilder the public. So how do we move things along?

The real debate should begin with why we need nuclear energy in the first place. At the top of nearly everyone’s list right now is fighting global warming (see UK Energy Secretary’s Ed Miliband’s recent national policy review statement). I fear this is the argument grabbed by industry’s PRs. It’s a dead end.

That’s not because global warming isn’t happening. It is not even because those most worried about AGW (anthropogenic global warming) are often those most opposed to to nuclear power. Nor is it because all ten sites identified in the UK face worries about GW-driven coastal erosion, rising seas, warming cooling water and storms. No, it runs deeper than that.

The trouble is that if dealing with climate change is ever taken seriously enough to panic, the major response is likely to be to aim seriously to reduce electricity demand. Bang would go the major benefit of nuclear energy. It is, after all, a virtually limitless secure energy supply source which boosts output and satisfies demand.

If AGW is taken seriously, the argument for an expensive and tricky source of energy would be commensurately somewhere between very weak and politically unfeasible.

Nukes don’t fit well into a no-growth-to-low energy low carbon unambitious world. But that’s what the EU is committed to right now (European Commission, Energy Policy for Europe, 10 January 2007, p5). It is an outlook that fits quite well with Greenpeace’s view:

“Gordon Brown very recently committed the UK to generating around 40 per cent of our electricity from renewables by 2020. If he means it, Britain could become a world leader in clean energy and his case for nuclear evaporates.”

So it does. Moreover, Greenpeace also rightly points out that nuclear power can only deliver a 4 per cent cut in carbon emissions some time after 2025 (though I’d hope by 2021). That said, it begs the question why Greenpeace gets het-up over building a few new coal plants today, which must be equally as insignificant in percentage terms (a case of one smart argument undermining a dumb one, I think).

Then there’s the energy gap argument. There certainly is a real threat that the UK’s lights could go out at sometime in the not-so distant future. But is virtually impossible to say when, or under what circumstances this would happen. There are too many variables for that.

For instance, old conventional plant can be made to worker longer than its original planned life. There’s an emerging world network of gas pipelines (and no it is not all about Russia), not to mention liquefied natural gas. Then there are renewables coming on stream, and there’s innovation. And when push comes to shove, as demand exceeds supply, rises in price could be used to dampen demand.

I don’t know what carbon price would seriously dent demand, but I suspect it would dent demand somewhat before it would encourage nuclear power.

Dieter Helm, Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College, has captured well how events continually alter the energy landscape in unexpected ways:

“Though the recession has brought a breathing space on the demand side of the equation, it has markedly worsened investment on the supply side. The credit crisis has made it harder and more expensive to finance investment; just when the investment is needed, finance has dried up.”

So how do I size up the debate and advise the nuclear industry to position itself? Well I think its case might go something like this. Britain is in recession, the world is in recession. The Far East is currently getting the edge on the West and it is doing so by not skimping on energy growth when it comes to coal or nuclear power.

The Tories might talk about a new age of austerity but if they want to hold out hope or hold on to power they had better have something more upbeat to offer. That can only be the prospect of economic growth – that requires investment in energy infrastructure and generation on an increasing scale. That supply will need to be secure, on tap on demand (unlike wind) and at a predictable price.

That all speaks to nuclear power strengths. In short, nuclear’s future may be rosy because AGW is not taken seriously, electricity demand is not seriously limited, and there are fears of a serious energy gap especially if it’s decided that AGW matters, but not enough to drive serious (demand-denting) policy.

So who cares if the first couple of UK new nuclear power stations are a little late, over budget and more difficult to build than predicted? That’s life when it comes to making visions come true when it comes to major infrastructure investment. It’s no big deal. For sure, as we build nuclear plants en masse the economies of scale will accrue.

But there’ll be no nuclear revival of significance or true merit so long as the debate remains stuck where it is. It is time to ramp up the nuclear message and link it to economic growth, security, prosperity and hope (a point made well by the authors of Energise! here). It is time to assume that we want a great deal of electricity and at moderate prices (prices only slightly ramped up by carbon taxes) and preferably with an acceptable carbon footprint.

This argument would be gung-ho, cynical, sceptical, realistic. It would be upbeat. Oh dear, what a tough authentic sell.

For the record, I spent almost ten years working in the nuclear industry in the UK, Ukraine and Switzerland, including for the Nuclear Industry Association.

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The first time I considered transparency as an issue was as an eighteen year-old reading Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son. One of them contains this 18th century nugget that I’ve never forgotten:

“Without some dissimulation no business can be carried out at all. It is simulation that is false. Dissimulation is only to hide your cards.”

When I read Paul’s piece it was that quote that came to mind. There are often good reasons not to be too transparent even in public service, I thought.

Consider gays in the US military. The Don’t ask, don’t tell (DADT) is a semi-official licence designed to encourage opaqueness in the military. Personally, I favour the right of gays to serve openly, but if one is going to fudge the issue this seems to be almost an acceptable way to do so. It may be inadequate to purists, but it was a halfway decent staging-post to somewhere more honest (and may be not all that superior).

Or consider collective responsibility in government, as did The Times’s Danny Finkelstein in last Sunday’s edition of Westminster Hour on BBC Radio 4. He said that politicians who always speak their minds honestly cannot be good colleagues, because party government depends on the necessarily artificial device of assuming that there is a collegiate view.

Or consider the necessity of ordinary social deceit. The “Does my bum look big in this?” dilemma faces many people.

Or consider whether a schoolboy owes respect to a headmaster who has not yet (in the boy’s view or that of his father) “earned” it. Well, there is a necessary hypocrisy which suggests that respect is owed ex officio. (See Rod Liddle, Sunday Times, 26 October 2009.)

Or consider the politician who in public espouses infant vaccination but can’t get his spouse to allow it on his own baby? Must he be forced to come clean about the status of his own child?

These cases make me feel that transparency may or may not be valuable in this or that circumstance, but also that it is a new species of infantilism to think that transparency is always and everywhere a Good Thing as a matter of principle.

Perhaps, though, transparency is a decent principle for governance? Again, I think not. Transparency could actually be very bad for corporate and political governance. It may produce the unintended consequence of driving all serious deliberations and decisions deep underground  (off-the-record management that’s not accountable to anybody, ever etc.).

When it comes to managing public finances I agree wholeheartedly that transparency is increasingly hard to argue against. But surely, there’s something wrong when transparency in the UK results in the controversial backdated caps on MPs’ expenses recommended by auditor Sir Thomas Legg? Of course in that case – and there are many – the problem isn’t the transparency but the childishness which greeted the facts it revealed.(Too many of the public were unable to cope with the idea that they were contributing to their legislators’ lifestyles.)

I doubt that forcing people to reveal the “truth” will lead to either party (the informant or the informee) becoming wiser or nicer, at least not quickly.

There’s a very real danger that people will simply lie, or be forced to dissemble with greater and greater sophistication. Or they will become mealy-mouthed, say-nothing niceness cyphers.

Indeed, more transparency can only work well if we all become more and more indifferent to the information we increasingly glean. If we do get to the position where everyone knows everything about our finances (or our sexual orientation), we will also need to be in the position of saying, “So what?” to those who make a big deal of these things (or seek to bully or blackmail us). But there is something very authoritarian about arriving there. Surely, some things are personal, or secret for good political and commercial reasons, and revealing them should not be a public requirement?

As Paul Holmes rightly says on his blog, “transparency is less and less tenable as a strategy, because information has a way of fighting free of constraints….” What does this mean for PRs? I think it means that we need to push back on the demand for transparency as a principle. We should be very specific when we use the term and seek to identify when and where it is best to advocate or reject its use.

Otherwise, I fear, transparency is doomed to become the new opaque, and that wouldn’t be honest, would it?

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First, here’s the CPRS National Board definition of PR, which it endorsed in February 2009, in Fredericton, New Brunswick:

Public relations is the strategic management of relationships between an organization and its diverse publics, through the use of communication, to achieve understanding, realize organizational goals, and serve the public interest. (Flynn, Gregory & Valin, 2008)

As detailed in a post to PR Conversations, Introducing a new, maple-infused definition of public relations, in both official languages, by Canadian Judy Gombita, a member of CPRS, the definition is being discussed by the “defining” architects, other contributors and frequent commentators to PRC, plus academics at PR Conversations.

Some of their comments have expressed a wish that other PR bodies in other countries should endorse the CPRS line. Without wanting to be a party-pooper for the sake of it, here’s why I hope they will not be successful.

Who do PRs represent?

The problem PR professionals (let’s just call them ‘PRs’) confront is the following. We have to decide whether our first duty as PR advisers is to our clients or to the public. Do we swear allegiance to both on equal terms even though it is our clients, rather than the public, which pay for our services? Would it be ethical to treat both responsibilities equally?

Now let’s examine some of the problems with this latest attempt at a reconciliation of this conundrum.

Proposition A (“realise organizational goals”) is scuppered by Proposition B (“and serve the public interest”), unless we are to have a rather strained oxymoron.

PRs are paid to promote the interests of their employers. They promote A within the bounds of decency and the law. They do this – if they do it properly – professionally in the best sense of the word. That is in the public interest (B) in the sense that having one-sided advocacy is a part of free society since freedom is not merely the right to speak but the understanding that truth and good sense emerge from competing arguments.

In other words, the defence advocate is serving the pubic interest almost whatever the merit of his or her client. Almost all the time, the PR’s job is to persuade the public that A equals B. But unless these two propositions are simply supposed to be coterminous (which is a stretch) there is often an important tension between propositions A and B. In reality, PRs have to favour A under the cover of espousing B.

The honest PR would admit that PRs dress up A as B. They would insist that his or her professionalism dictates that they should warn the public about the threat of “deception” (or at the very least, one-sidedness) which lies therein. This is why it is so unprofessional and sad and demeaning that PRs should (often do) pretend that A and B are always, or even should or must be, a good match.

It has always been a comfort to me and to colleagues that doing A is clearly defensible (within limits) and doable whilst achieving B is as hard to achieve as it is to define.

Public interest is hard to define

It is the impossibility of defining pubic interest (B) which has reinforced our civilisation’s conviction that lots of A (“realise organizational goals”), done competitively but within limits, is really the best way of achieving B. I say this in the spirit of how markets, democracies and debates are organised in the free world and how they actually behave in practice.

None of this is to deny that a PR may want to enrich an employer’s view of what A is, and do it by framing a view of B which could be promoted. A good example of this is corporate responsibility (CR) and a commitment to sustainability.

Hence, the honest PR needs to make a distinction between espousing B as an instrumental matter for pursuing A, and as a goal in its own right. He or she also must distinguish between pretending to know what B really is, and adopting a popular view of B, or a view of B which was plausible but also suited A.

Obviously the more B is bent out of shape so as to fit A the less the PR can claim a real moral power for his use of B, or for his employer as it claims to adopt B. Therein lies the accusation of greenwash and much more, as the rift between reality and practice produces a credibility gap.

It is my view that authenticity, truthfulness and being aligned with reality will nearly always and in the long run trump fluff, flannel and puff (spin) when it comes to winning long-term public trust; even if the case put is uncomfortable and unpopular. That’s to say: the long-term “organizational goals” will usually be best met with honest PR. With any luck, being honest will usually strike the public as having been in the public interest too.

The notion of the public interest is somewhat loose. We all have our own wildly differing definitions of what it is; even if sometimes it is also clear to all (most) of us what it is not. Being honest – and prizing honesty – is a principle that has stood up pretty well.

That is why it may be best to leave the public interest out of it. The International Public Relations Association (IPRA) Gold Paper No: 6 seems on safer ground when it notes that:

‘[According to the Dutch PR association] Public relations is the systematic promotion of mutual understanding between an organisation and its public‘. Or, as the British express it: ‘Public relations is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its public’.

Of these, I have a fairly decent quibble with the British definition. To “maintain goodwill” might involve a good deal of deception or systematic lack of frankness. “Mutual understanding” is nice because to understand something includes the idea that what one is learning is not untrue. (The English language does not allow that one can “know” or “understand” an untruth.)

Is PR related to propaganda?

By the way, Gold Paper 6 gets muddled when it tries to explain why PR and propaganda are different. It describes propaganda as a one-way process wherein the public (or a particular section of it) is a nominated target and the objective is to change public thinking or prompt public responsive action.

But perhaps the most successful propaganda campaign ever devised was based on two-way communication. It was also grand in scale and viral in nature.

The Four-Minute Men campaign launched by The Committee on Public Information contained many of the founders of the PR industry. During the First World War it rallied community-based opinion-formers who made speeches in favour of the war, interactively and face-to-face, to millions of people gathered in small audiences across the length and breadth of the United States of America.

What’s my view of a working description of PR?

I like to say – as Bill Huey did here – that PR is defined by its practice. Or, as an Hegelian might say: the spirit of PR is involved in self-realization by the process of movement, development, evolution and progress. If I had to pick one word that captures its essence it would be “advocacy”: the act of pleading or arguing for something to influence an outcome on behalf of clients, preferably by using two-way communication techniques. That is to stress that I am not all that interested in PR which persuades people to think a certain thing unless the PR has invited and accepted and met informed challenge by the target audience.

At the end of the day, PRs have to acknowledge that they are not in business to push their own varied agendas on to their clients. Rather they represent – advocate – their employers’ interests. PRs are more like barristers than priests. True, they can – like doctors or management consultants – help fix their employers’ problems. True, they can – like diplomats – bring the wider world to their employers and sensitise their employers to the wider world’s needs. Be they however sophisticated, flacks are hacks – they are for hire. That does not mean they leave decency or professionalism behind when they go to work.

Indeed, the definitions I recommend for them may be more rigorous and personally costly than swimming with the tide of fashionable nostrums, which is my beloved trade’s commonest activity right now.

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