Global PR Summit speaker Uri Hasson, assistant professor psychology/Neuroscience Institute, Princeton

The social sciences often get in a muddle when they pretend to be scientific. Economics, sociology, history and pre-history, all blaze the trail here. Public relations, a trade steeped in conflicted logic and rhetoric and impressions if ever there was one, ought to be very nervous when its practitioners affect to have a scientific underpinning.

One of the arguments for PR to adopt neuro-scientific findings is precisely to spot the partially hard-wired human characteristics that define what Richard Dawkins calls our cultural memes, which explains all evolution (social and biological) by the differential survival of interacting self-replicating viral-like entities. This outlook is premised on a primitive materialist understanding of human nature, not to mention neo-eugenic theories. It is a viewpoint that maintains that human society is largely the product of pre-programmed (or re-programmable) mind- and fuzzy cultural-genes; in other words, evolutionary psychology. It leads many to believe that science can fathom our world so that PR pros can nudge the right triggers (neural, genetic, cultural) to get people to behave in a predictable, controllable and/or desired manner.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with the science of eugenics (nor with epigenetics) in principle: among other potential benefits, it allows us to eradicate some very awful inherited diseases such as Down’s syndrome. But we should worry when the research of neuroscientists or geneticists aims, or claims, to give scientific weight to ideas that are the social product of prejudice, politics and culture, or which are philosophical in content. In the 20th century, as we all know, some very backward – and nowadays totally discredited – beliefs and ideologies were once said to have had a scientific validity rooted in our supposed ingrained sociobiological make up.

The question is just how much can we rely on quantitative behavioural measures and neuro-scientific insights into our brain patterns to assess qualitative human variables such as our opinions and feelings.

There is a school of PR thought that promotes to clients the predictive power of algorithms and neuro-science to assist in identifying the ‘relationship value’ of networks amongst an institution’s stakeholders. Professor Toni Muzi Falconi advanced such thinking on PR Conversations in his piece ‘Improving stakeholder relationships through nets, neuros and algorithms‘, saying:

“Computer science allows the use of algorithms, which greatly reduce the need to research more than small samples of stakeholder groups. Likewise, neuroscience allows the integration of qualitative and quantitative indicators, which are closely connected to how relationships influence one another.”

Describing what he is looking for, he adds:

“Interactions within stakeholder groups (or between the groups) can reveal – through graphics – the primary relationship nodes, as well as their interconnections. A mathematical analysis of these networks, supported by computer-led software, offers the essential numerical elements of specific indicators/variables.”

I accept that in a digital world we can trawl for lots of interconnected data. Yet it would be a big mistake to read too much meaning into what’s revealed. As Heather Yaxley commented on PR Conversations:

“Whether or not we have relationships with brands and whether or not they can, or should be trying to map our relationship is equally problematic. For example I am not a great fan of Carphone Warehouse generally, but it gave great service in replacing my Blackberry. So what does this mean? Nothing. I don’t care about the company, don’t want it to engage me, build a relationship, etc. It provided a service when I needed it – end of story.”

She, not for the first time, is spot on. However my concerns, and I suspect hers, run much deeper. There is something potentially very dangerous and worrying about this trend that puts PR in the hands of the latest psychological and sociobiological psuedo-scientific theories. For anybody who thinks I exaggerate, here’s the first paragraph from a press release promoting Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science:

“Too much choice can be a bad thing—not just for the individual, but for society. Thinking about choices makes people less sympathetic to others and less likely to support policies that help people, according to a study published…”

It goes on to describe research findings which showed:

“Simply thinking about ‘choice’ made people less likely to support policies promoting greater equality and benefits for society, such as affirmative action, a tax on fuel-inefficient cars, or banning violent video games.”

Hence, to persuade us to think the right way, make the right choices and reduce our levels of stress, these scientists advocate that PR pros should become master-manipulators of neural pathways. Under the guise of evidence-based PR, this is an approach to public engagement that justifies the efficacy of its strategies by citing results based on biased research findings, as Toni Muzi Falconi puts it, “[of no] more than small samples of stakeholder groups.” For example, the same Association for Psychological Science press release cites Krishna Savani of Columbia University opining:

“’In America, we make choices all the time—in the cafeteria, in the supermarket, in the shopping mall,’ Savani says. He wonders if, in the long run, all those consumer choices might have a cumulative negative impact by making people less sympathetic towards others and less concerned about the collective good.”

Barry Schwartz, Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College

Such prejudicial reasoning reinforces that of other neuro scientists and psychologists such as Barry Schwartz, who also say we are oppressed and made unhappy by too much choice and freedom. The logic of Savani, Shwartz and Co’s proposition is that, with some major help from PR pros, society should seek to constrain competition relating to things, options and ideas. They maintain that it is both possible and desirable to manipulate the public’s neurons and subconscious genetic programming to ensure that it adopts the right (as in their preferred) behaviour and worldview. This small elite, of course, unlike us more irrational beings known as the mass public, know what is and is not in the public interest.

Their message and that of their PR backers seems to be that capitalism, freedom and democracy are overrated. Contrariwise: I maintain that ethical PR depends upon its practitioners respecting the moral autonomy of different players by helping people make informed decisions. Put another way, the psychobabble which underpins trendy nudge theory rests on ethically suspect and untrustworthy, not to mention unscientific, foundations.

That’s a point made convincingly by the physician, gerontologist and clinical scientist Raymond Tallis in Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Mankind. Tallis pulls apart Richard Dawkin’s neo-Darwinian explanations of human consciousness by exposing its degrading account of humanity’s uniqueness. In summary, Tallis’s book in defence of scientific integrity, which lauds and explains neuro-science’s progress, at the same time exposes neo-neurobabble, as well as biological accounts of culture that maintain ‘we are our brains’ and which reduce self-consciousness to a mirror of biologism.

That’s why I have to applaud Andrew Mayne’s piece on Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist where Mayne said that psychobabble spreads when the scientific community lets rip by assuming:

“… their expertise in their own field also gives them a proficiency in totally unrelated areas like economics and political science. Add in group reinforcement from their peers and you have a group of politically and religiously homogenized people who have very different ideas from you and I on what exactly ‘the public good’ means.”

I have also to concur with Mayne’s view that:

“Market theory, evolutionary psychology and neuroeconomics have reinforced what Adam Smith already told us, that the best measure of what brings about the public good isn’t found in measuring just one choice, it’s the cumulative effect of all the different choices that we make as a society. Choice causes anxiety, but it’s an important part of being a human and not a member of an ant colony.”

Having said that, up to a point I suppose that PRs and marketers do indeed, as professor Falconi says, rely on the usefulness of algorithms. For instance, our supermarket loyalty cards and our behaviour on Google allow for useful data-mining to predict what we might be interested in in future. The more supermarkets know about which types of consumers buy which types of products and when, the better they can serve their customers. Moreover, Google’s entire business is rooted in the smart use of algorithms, which we all manipulate to influence search engine optimisation to get the messages of our clients at the top of the pile.

But we shouldn’t get carried away the way that Google’s Eric Schmidt does. He believes that his company’s algorithms can really see inside our minds. He says Google can take serendipity out of the equation. Moving on from telling us how Google is run, he implies that its model could be used to organise the world economy. It could, he believes, enable society to predict electronically in advance what consumers will desire and want in the future. The logical implication being that capitalism can do what communism aims to do, which is to plan production in a conscious fashion; in Schmidt’s world, by seeing into our “unconscious” minds to discover what will soon become a concrete demand.

If I may wander for a moment, Schmidt’s view is very Edward Bernays. Now I admire – and sometimes defend – Bernays. He was clever and insightful, but he was a propagandist: a manipulator. His ideas were in tune with - and perhaps inspired – propaganda techniques on both sides of WW2 and the Cold War. And he used it to flog stuff. It is true that he deliberately used ideas about the “unconscious” – ideas which he got from his uncle Sigmund Freud. I could argue (in line with keeping science out of PR) that the unconscious is a pre-scientific idea as old as the Greeks’ Psyche, and their sophisticated understanding of art and illusion: so he wasn’t all that scientific or original really. I’d rather argue that when propagandists hope to deploy scientific canniness in the media world to influence mass opinion, I hope and believe good old political prejudices (not ‘scientific’ ones), and insightful ideas and reasoned argument will, if they are allowed to, see through the guff. The success of the Bernays-Goebbels axis was not the success of science, not even in its Freudian form, but the failure of the German mass-mind to detect bollocks.

Ok, now that’s off my chest, let’s get back to Schmidt. He believes that most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, but to tell them what they should be doing next. But he sees this as involving more than providing choices. Schmidt views it instead as others deciding (taking the risk and guess work out of the marketplace) in advance which choices we will make:

“The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them [in advance].

Though that only works – if for one moment we suspend disbelief and imagine it ever could – if Google plays the role of the communist centralised state by exploiting (and retaining) its de facto monopoly on internet search, aggregation and interaction. But I feel comfortable in saying that will never happen. It won’t happen for the same reason that Schmidt’s reasoning is flawed. Innovation, competition and new risk-taking continually redefine the human experience in new and unpredictable ways, the way Compaq, Microsoft, the internet and Google did recently.

”Google envisions a future in which computers anticipate your whims” The Future according to Larry Page, CNN January 2013

Of course it is wonderful to see a modern capitalist like Schmidt saying that scientific and technological imperatives engineer choice out of consuming and uncertainty out of producing. But the hubris of the thing antagonises one. Doesn’t he know life’s more complicated than that? Doesn’t he spot that if he was right, we might hate him and flock to a search engine that did stuff differently? It is at least intriguing to see a man predicting that what looks like the triumph of his business – information and individualism – is merely the triumph of manipulation. But hold on. This isn’t really manipulation: it’s anticipation as the word ought to be used. It’s not all that creepy or conspiratorial so much as an expression of over-confidence.

Every business in the world takes a crack at getting ahead of the taste of its customers. For my money, the better they get at it, the better my life will be. And of course the genius of the modern world is that huge firms are getting better and better at working out the zillions of niches they have to cater to.

Anyway, you readily see, I think, that any claim that says human behaviour can be explained by, not to mention controlled by, the application of biological and neuro science is codswallop.

So in contrast to the PR utopians who promoted the benefits of neuro-scientific insights at The Holmes Report’s Global PR Summit 2012, I maintain their claims are about as believable as the now discredited, but recently fashionable, idea, which suggested that computer-based equations devised by boffins could produce packages that strip the risk out of financial instruments and end the boom and bust cycle. So let people aim to map the human mass mind: I imagine they’ll have all the luck which has attended those who try to map a single one.

For more on this from me see here.

Note: this is an updated essay which first appeared on this blog on April 1, 2011.

The big picture

Anyone who cares about Britain, its government and its wider official culture is shaken and stirred by recent media storms. PR professionals ought to be a great position to understand what’s been going on. After all, they are media-obsessed, and narratives and messaging are at the heart of the problem faced by our institutions.

The people at the top of our society need to understand far better than they do that they are in the grip of crappy narratives. Some are of their own making; others are thrust on them. It is too little realised that when they slip up, the problem is often that they have been distracted from reality by phantasms they have aimed to promote or preserve or they have been shafted by phantasms the malicious foist on them. The bellowing of the media amplifies these ghosts so they become the new reality, and a very loud one.

The main point of what follows is to show that there is a very wide – a post modern – conspiracy of the fanciful and that we now need to cultivate real leadership, and a taste for reality. It is almost as important to note that the great difficulty for those running anything now is that nearly everyone yearns for an ideal which they mostly (except in their own area of operations) affect to despise: that there be a few good people in charge.

The problem discussed here is mostly official, though firms need to learn to describe themselves more robustly too.  Still, though it’s easy to bemoan the cupidity and venality of the people who run our capitalism, at least they fell prey to the greed we employ them for. Actually, unless they are in retail, they have also shown a nearly sublime indifference to the media storm around them.

The media is more or less blameless: for all its power, it is as bad and useless as its audiences demand. At the high end, its mistakes are mostly intellectual. Even the commercial gutter press has only been horrible in an exaggerated version of its own, particular ancient habits: the sole real surprise has been the way its boss-class looks and sounds so like that of other bureaucracies.

The people who run the police, the BBC, our Civil Service, quite a few junior politicians and the most recent three Prime Ministers, have been more depressing. They have seemed willing to behave out of character and betray the core traditions of their offices. And of course, their prat-falls often involved the media. Our power-merchants seemed, so often, like moths to the flame.

Because Britain is almost always the test-bed for the next cultural revolution, I am quite inclined to think our current difficulties are not terminal: they are – with luck – a sign of growing pains as our governing class adjusts to new forms of excellence and accountability. Of course they face the difficulty that modern politics and bureaucracy begin with a lie: they have to pretend to despise themselves for being elitist.

How PR could have helped

Good public relations mostly reminds people that the truth will out. Bankers couldn’t fix Libor in private; parliamentary expenses frauds were bound to leak; BBC journalists wouldn’t suppress their own story; the Downing Street CCTV would say something about Plebgate. But of course it is the second truth of PR that the facts will often get bent out of shape before they get straightened out, if they ever do. MPs might have guessed that a few expenses frauds would be made to characterise their entire rather mean allowance system; the BBC that it would be forgotten that it was perhaps only scrupulous to be wary of broadcasting the Savile allegations; News International that phone hacking was a pretty ordinary matter of criminality, for all that it exploded a culture war. Even so, much of what unfolded was avoidable. An old, wise PR could also stress that every malfeasance would feed into a separate and an often phoney meta-narrative. That’s sod’s law and will take decades of boring probity to undo.

A sophisticated PR could have told the highest echelons of our political class that sooner or later, those who are in thrall to narrative and to media management will be portrayed as empty vessels. To an important extent, that at least will be an accurate portrayal.

Life at the top: Political rot

Let’s see where we have been. For a decade or so we witnessed a sort of political melt-down, and it derived from the way politicians capitulated to the media. Messrs Blair, Blair and Cameron in their different ways were governed by their media operations. Tony Blair believed that his New Labour creation would be stillborn without maximum story-control. He did not realise, or didn’t care, that he wasn’t writing the script; the scripts – over the years he tried several - were writing him. Gordon Brown seems to have believed himself immunised from ordinary considerations by having been the son of the manse. David Cameron stayed a little more rooted in the reality community, but he understood that where Labour had had to bury socialism, the Tories had to bury nastiness. He made the mistake of thinking it wise to bury the whole animal, just to be sure. He took the enormous risk of being a blank. In both cases, the new total politics – the belief in politics as three parts narrative to one part government – seemed to have left too little energy or oxygen for the wider body politic. The main character of Blairism has turned out to be vacuity, relieved only by a scatter of initiatives, sustained spending, and – amazingly - war. Cameronism may turn out to be a very un-Tory Omnishambles, relieved only by a certain economic sternness and rationalised by the inevitable fudged murkiness of coalition. (The combined, valuable legacy of these two smooth – rather opaque – men may well be to have found the keys to John Major’s country at ease with itself.)

The central paradox is that the masters of narrative seem to have been enfeebled by their willingness to take the media so seriously. Luckily, the dominance of narrative will probably implode. It embodies tendencies which have proved close to ruinous to governance, a matter few politicians care about until near retirement. But media-obsession has been shown to damage political reputations quite quickly, and that sort of thing matters far more urgently to the cleverest practitioners. Already some young political stars seem to be learning how to do their proper thing. Peter Oborne has often remarked that in modern Britain we see a professional political class. It is beginning to spawn some interesting types. The “intake of 2010″ may turn out alright.

Life a little lower down: institutional meltdown

It is less clear that a new generation of administrators have found ways of expressing themselves and explaining how they want to work. There is a post-Thatcher, Blairite administrative class of apparatchiks which poses great difficulties. Some of the members of the “quangocracy” figure in Quentin Letts’s Fifty People Who Buggered-up Britain, and he was too unkind about them. Still, his point is well-made: To be amongst the modern nomenklatura is to have proved oneself adapt at a certain sort of PC script, all about inclusivity and openness. Cultural bureaucrats especially are adept at a trahison des clercs, which sees e metropolitan elite casually trashing culture in the name of accessibility. Nearly everywhere, behind a façade of populism, we find smooth operators, often with a large arrogance only slightly hidden by practiced dissembling. Onora O’Neill is surely right to point to what she calls the “perversions of trust”: mantras of transparency, and even its fetishistic practice, do not guarantee that trust will emerge – or is even seriously intended. People rely on a reading of character as the best guarantee of trust-worthiness: this is the oddly personal element in professions and institutions and talking to a script seldom reassures people that it is in place.

At the very top now we seem to miss that curious mixture of savviness, clubbability and honour which once glued things together, and rooted them, and not always in a good way. Instead we have hyper-networkers who are schooled in a special sort of correct thought and behaviour. They are compliant and understand compliance. We have swapped one form of conformism (one forged in the Empire,  warfare and the Classics) and substituted it for another (cooked up in multiculturalism, seminars and Channel 4). To a large extent, to run a public institution one must first exude a victim-orientated liberalism and then insist that there is wisdom in crowds.

Whitehall farce

The highest strata of the Civil Service faced a special difficulty. They were bound to be in turmoil as Whitehall shifted from being a provider to framing itself as a facilitator. The old governance of Pall Mall has become The Archipelago State. The Civil Service was, in theory, scrapping itself in an orgy of outsourcing and devolution. Its most senior people were also prepared to sacrifice long-standing, workable traditions of independence because they believed – with their political masters – that there was no alternative to running government from Message Central in Number 10. One after the other, four retired Cabinet Secretaries have bemoaned this tendency, seeming to forget they had been the gate-keepers who sold the pass.

The curious life and death of The Establishment

I am not unduly nostalgic about our old bureaucracies. Misplaced loyalty to class or organisation; a dislike of rocked boats; an acceptance of convention; a toleration of general uselessness:  for much of the 20th Century these played their part in how things were run. Failures were often covered up, at least for a while. People suffered because of the discrete charms of the bourgeois.

In many ways, schools, hospitals, GP surgeries, law courts, police stations (and the backs of police vans) and the BBC are probably better run than they used to be. Maybe even children’s and old people’s homes, and welfare offices, are too. (The terrible press they get shouldn’t be our guide to their condition.) Affluence, media assertiveness and performance monitoring have combined with increased education to make this country quite a happy and successful place.

We should not trash the past, though. There never was a British Establishment in quite the way that is often supposed and much of our erstwhile elitism was public-spirited. Top People were, anyway, prone to promote their own mythologies. The liberal journalist Anthony Sampson, I am afraid, only had to amplify their own story to go on to peddle the view that the country was ruled by networks bound together by Old School ties, and by Varsity cliques, which were the creatures of an upper middle class. Just as things in the real world were changing fast, his “Anatomy of Britain” books fed into a older story of decline, ossification and snobbishness which nested nicely with the Beyond the Fringe, TW3, Fortune and Bird satire industry of the time. It has morphed into the near-monopoly of the cynical pseudo-dissidence of Have I Got News For You. The misreading of class changes was threaded through Yes, Minister, the TV show which enshrined, with perfect mis-timing, the idea of an unaccountable administrative elite just as the Civil Service was in fact ceding power to the politicians and the media.

These tropes were always sloppy and misleading and are now importantly redundant. But they remain much more powerful as myths now than they ever were as facts. We can see this in the easy assumption that the Tories are toffs and thus out of touch. This is a glamorous classed-up version of the general view that politicians from whatever sort of estate are out for themselves. Never mind that too many of them have become constituent-obsessed social workers and fixers, as James Gray, MP has had the courage to point out: for now, the dominant image is the old one.

Curious shifts in modern politics

Indeed, the political commentariat may be institutionally blind to the most important developments on their patch. Modern young MPs may have begun to abandon party loyalty and the top-down messaging and management of Blair and Cameron. There are signs of a greater independence of thought amongst some MPs, but it sometimes takes the form of a brutal populism. Indeed, there may even be a belief that social media embody some sort of unstoppable General Will. Michael Portillo seems sound on this stuff (“Cameron shouldn’t fear the EU wolf”, Financial Times, 14 December 2012). Ferdinand Mount’s The New Few argues, contrariwise, that oligarchic tendencies are growing in our political parties. I reply that if he is right that they are strong, it is worth noting that they are newly-embattled.

The modern narrative and the institution

The perennial sloppiness of the media and its audiences are in lock-step. Certain sorts of stories and narratives have acquired very serious clout. They have developed a life of their own. They are pushed and then volumised on many platforms, in a deafening unison. The common denominator is that all authority is always assumed to be self-serving. People in command or in a position to understand awkward facts feel powerless to resist the wall of half-truth and delusion. And yet, paradoxically, they often seek to manipulate what they rightly fear will become unmanageable.

This is where we see the paramount need for experience, savviness and character at the top our institutions. In the modern world, where public exposure is so brutal (and where old defensive mechanisms have decayed) it may be that only a robust honesty and a stroppy integrity will work, and only in the long – seldom the short – term. An institution can only gain trust when it proves itself honest and that will often require that its staff and leaders be bloody-minded.

To a surprising degree, institutions and especially government, will need to own its own truths. Pace Baronness O’Neill, the modern passion to submit oneself to independent monitoring or investigation or inquiry does not actually produce trust. It makes the public stir itself into the realisation that public bodies don’t even trust themselves to work out where their weaknesses lie and what their mistakes were. Indeed, they are blind to their own merits and unable to promote them. We may come to see that neither Chilcot nor Leveson could fulfill their billing: they were over-hyped blockbusters, full of shock and awe, but also a distraction from more quietly fixing some broken stuff we knew about already. One’s character – one’s reputation – cannot so easily be outsourced.

Hard case: the BBC

When the BBC pulled one Newsnight investigation (into Savile) and then botched another (into a very old story which had been often been travestied before), we saw that this great media institution had absolutely no idea how stories work. It was used to producing news items and reports and seems to have made the enormous mistake of thinking that in some sense it could control them. So, a Newsnight editor could shelve an investigation and neither he nor anyone else at the BBC seems to have realised what a powerful life of its own it would have. (David Elstein chronicles the events well here.)

In the Newsnight cases, and it applies a little in the case of the BBC 2006 climate change seminar story too, the BBC may have been foolish enough to think that its being nice and liberal and even well-behaved in its own way would be insulation against the horrors which the rest of the media – and its own staff – reserve for the unwashed of the right. I can easily see how all the BBC’s mistakes got made, and they weren’t the worst mistakes in the world by a long chalk. But they were all chronically naïve and unworldly.

Savvy PR would have told the BBC top brass that a Newsnight-shaped shit-storm was heading their way and no amount of guidelines and compliance would save them from it.

BBC staff weren’t wicked. But they were variously feeble. In both Newsnight disasters no-one seems to have been seriously concerned that for the BBC to do the right institutional thing, actual individuals had to become the grit in the oyster. One can except, perhaps, the Newsnight  editor who started it all by thinking it might be wrong to trash the reputation of a dead man on what he thought was inadequate research. It is important to see that this editorial decision was not the serious mistake which got made. Curiously, it was as though no-one felt they had agency. No-one felt they owned the story. More prosaically, and in language older professionals would have understood, the absence of “grip” was centre stage.

Hard case: Plebgate

The Plebgate drama adds a further dimension to the story of how stories behave now. It has become a commonplace that everyone wants to star in one. Worse, people – including, perhaps, policemen or their union – who are close to media action become specially tempted by the possibility of manipulating a story to their own advantage. Of course, we don’t yet know where the blame lies for Plebgate. But it looks possible that some uniformed coppers and some Police Federation reps may have been seduced by class tropes, satirical riffs and techniques of spin. If so, they did not understand what they were doing. Goodness alone knows why the Met’s Commissioner responded to quite damning evidence by at first stressing that his concern was the welfare of his officers.

Last lessons

The police can’t really win in Plebgate. At worse, Andrew Mitchell can be accused of losing his cool with a job’s worth. At best, policemen with guns seem like big girls’ blouses. The BBC, likewise, can only watch and learn: its vaunted ethics of impartiality and public service may have transmogrified into unworldiness. It may need to abandon its Olympian superiority.

Some crucial people in the BBC and the police seem to have had the terrible PR training that afflicts most of our new ruling classes. That’s to say: they didn’t remember they are in a goldfish bowl. They seemed to forget that the truth or something quite like it would be bound to get out. They forgot the appalling behaviour of stories. They hadn’t been told: Don’t tweak these tigers; don’t imagine you can hang on to their tails.

If you can’t be savvy enough, and no-one ever is, the better thing is to be honourable or at least cheerfully adult. Oddly, that keeps you clear of many disasters as well as allowing you to sleep at night.

The real problem with Leveson’s report is that a high court judge has, almost amusingly, set himself up as a PR guru qualified to issue guidelines to the police and politicians about spinning PR practice. In the process, he ends up seeking to micromanage their processes and rules (codes) of engagement and to fiddle with the terminology they use to describe what they do. Let’s examine Leveson’s proposals in point 75 on page 43 of his executive summary as an example. There he states that:

The term ‘off-the-record briefing’ should be discontinued. The term ‘non-reportable briefing’ should be used to cover a background briefing which is not to be reported, and the term ‘embargoed briefing’ should be used to cover a situation where the content of the briefing may be reported but not until a specified event or time. These terms more neutrally describe what are legitimate police and media interactions.

One could conclude from this paragraph that Leveson’s intention was to ban ‘off the record briefings’, but that would be a mistake. Elsewhere he states quite clearly that that’s not what he means to achieve:

Everybody agrees that such briefings can operate in the public interest, particularly in the context of a relationship of trust between individual journalists and police officers: even-handedness is, however, critical. However, in the light of evidence I have heard I am concerned about the lack of clarity inherent in the use of the term and in the precise information to which it refers: I have therefore recommended that briefings should be designated as open, embargoed (in time), non-reportable or, where a combination, clear so as to be beyond doubt. (point 93 on p. 21 of his executive summary)

But if his intention was merely to change the PR vocabulary in order to avoid ambiguity, he’s failed.

Calling something a ‘non-reportable briefing’ implies just that: what’s said is clearly not meant to end up in print or to be reported anywhere else. Whereas PR pros and journalists know that ‘off the record’ more often than not means ‘non-attributable’ because the person doing the briefing does indeed hope to see most of what’s said appear in print/on air as ‘sources/insiders say/suggest/tell me’, or even (especially in ‘deep’ off the record) as the reporter’s very own insight without mentioning who inspired them to think so clearly.

Sometimes, an off the record briefing is intended to save the PR, the client and the journalist the embarrassment of a story’s appearing at all.  For instance, the press officer might let a reporter know – deeply off the record - that such-and-such a complainant against one’s client or employer (a police officer, say)  is bonkers or vicious and not to be trusted.  That, by the way, is why PR professionals need to cultivate journalists: both sides need to earn and deserve trust.

As to Sir Brian’s remarks on the use of background briefings – he is similarly confused or ill-informed.

Background briefings are often designed to bring journalists up to speed, with the intention of helping them to produce informed reports about complex issues. Hence, they are rarely used to get across hard news. They are often about quite boring matters of policy or technology which the journalist needs to understand and do so well enough to be confident about glossing over the nuts and bolts which inform a story but would clutter it to the point of unreadability.

The use of the term ‘embargoed’ is so deeply ingrained in the culture of journalists and PR professionals that I don’ think the good judge has anything useful to add. I’ve had a number of instances in my career when journalists have broken my embargoed comments or press releases, and I’ve made them grovel afterward. Such instances often taught me not to trust them. However, it has to be said that while breaking such rules is already considered shameful, sadly, standards have slipped in recent years and embargoes have been broken routinely by some journalists. This often means that PRs feel they have to withold information which would have helped journalists write more intelligently, if only they’d waited for the starting gun to publish.

Moreover, Leveson’s call for the police and their PR handlers to manage their media relations in a more even-handed manner is naive. There are good reasons why PR pros might favour journalist ‘a’ over journalist ‘b’ for this or that story. We are often talking about making judgement calls involving relationships based on trust. Sometimes, life is not fair; so be it. The issue of corruption and or overly-familiar relationships is another issue altogether.

Hence Lord Justice Leveson’s preference for imposing bureaucratic solutions that prioritise tinkering with PR’s operational codes, guidelines and terminology might be well-intentioned, rather than anything sinister, but that does not make it necessarily helpful or particularly insightful. Take this example:

For officers of the rank of Commander or Assistant Chief Constable and above, dealing with policy or significant organisational or operational matters, formality and record keeping should be required. More junior ranks should follow the Guidance issued by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) which includes only speaking to the press on topics for which they have responsibility for communicating and a policing purpose for doing so. I have also made recommendations designed to reduce the risk of abuse. (point 94 on p. 21/22 of his executive summary

An experienced press officer might see things differently. A junior police officer talking to the media unaccompanied by a press officer might pose a bigger threat of going off message than a senior officer with 20 years of media relations under their belt. Then, there’s the thorny issue that I raised previously (here and here) about defining what constitutes ‘policy’ versus ‘organisational’ versus ‘operational’ matters.

It strikes me that the judge was bamboozled by the evidence he heard at his inquiry relating to ‘tip offs, taking media on operations, off-the-record briefings, leaks, whistle-blowing, entertainment’ (see: point 90 on p. 21 of his executive summary). It would seem, then, that Leveson is not only a clumsy wordsmith, he also rather arrogantly over-estimated his own expertise and grasp of all things PR.

Having said all that, I do share Leveson’s wish to encourage the police to develop more formal relations with the media. I share his disgust for how the police – not to mention politicians – have managed their media relations over the last few decades. In fact, I’ve long banged on that drum and called for change. The difference between me and Leveson, however, is that much of my critique has focused on the prejudices and practices of PR professionals themselves. I’ve accused them of being, too often, more keen to serve the media’s needs than their employer’s. Anybody who wants to know more should read my ‘Cops should exercise right to silence‘ and ‘Three Mile Island to G20: lessons in crisis PR‘.

Phil Morgan’s comment

Thanks for your comments – an interesting blog and good to see your views.

When we said “This acknowledgement of the expertise and support provided by public relations professionals underlines the need for them to be accountable to a code of conduct as well” we were refering to our own code of conduct, which requires professionals to deal honestly with the public. We’re not talking about any other codes but the ones that are available to hold professionals in public relations to account.

The recommendation in the report was specifically when policy or organisational matters are being discussed, not, as you point out, for on the spot, crime scene press handling. This would appear to support the idea put forward later that police officers and staff should communicate within their area of competence, responsibly and where there is a policing reason for doing so.

I think you may be over-reading our comment about the professional accountability of those working in public relations into Leveson’s comments about ‘off-the-record’. It seems to me that his call for a change in terminology is to reduce confusion about the relationships through which information is conveyed to the press. It wasn’t our intention to endorse this and our position is at best neutral. Simple steps that increase transparency, particularly in sensitive areas of media relations, should be welcomed.

It will come as no surprise that I disagree with your assessment of PR as a trade – which, if it remains so, is certainly moving towards professionalisation. Accountability to a code of conduct is currently as close to a licence to operate as public relations has got, but it is available and it would at least underline expected standards of professional conduct if more people operating in this area were accountable.

More generally, whether it’s statutory or non-statutory, the resulting regulatory structure is unlikely to account for the rise in digital communication or the fragmentation of media that is rapidly taking place. The business model that supports journalism is struggling to put it mildly and it seems to me unlikely that the newspaper industry in 10 years time will resemble the one we have at the moment.

An open letter to CIPR

Dear Phil Morgan,

Thank you for responding on behalf of CIPR to my blog ‘PRs shouldn’t rush to welcome Leveson‘. You raise some interesting and considered points, and in that spirit, here are seven points, followed by a plea, that I hope you’ll take onboard.

1. Losing control

When it comes to codes of conduct, Leveson would make PR professionals responsible for obeying “his” code, or more precisely the one regulating the media; backed by statutory control, as he strongly recommends, or the more voluntary one – which would still somehow be legally binding - as David Cameron prefers.

That effectively takes things out of CIPR’s and the PR trade’s control. That has profound implications for PR professionals. Surely, that’s not what any of us has ever desired? At the very least it should make us wary of making any immediate response to Leveson’s report beyond “we’ll get back to you on that”?

2. Orwellian implications?

I was pleased to hear that CIPR is neutral about replacing “off the record” with “non-reportable briefing”. However…

I urge you to consider critically the implications of Leveson’s proposal to define the use of acceptable language and opinion and practice. For example: another way of reporting an “off the record briefing” is “inside sources inform me” etc. Don’t you see – as I do – something ever so slightly Orwellian about society policing by statute (or by any other means backed by penalties for disobedience) the use in print and on air of such phrases and nuances?

3. Problems with PR policing the police

Regarding the presence of press officers being made mandatory when “policy or organisational matters are being discussed” by the police, I would suggest that it is far from easy, perhaps even impossible in practice, to meaningfully separate “operational” matters (call it real-time policing) from things defined as “organisational”. Hence, I fear (see 4) that if this recommendation became an obligation enshrined in statute or any form of legally binding code of practice it would create a clammed-up bureaucratic culture that harms good policing and damages their public relations.

4. Is transparency the new opaque that undermines trust?

The issue of policing police media relations is part of a wider concern I have about how Leveson understands the issue of transparency and the public interest. He proposes that all meetings between the media and public officials (particularly police and politicians) should be monitored. However this smacks of the same mentality that led Tony Blair to introduce the Freedom of Information Act, which he later called a dangerous act and cited as one of the biggest mistakes of his period in power. That was because it had the opposite effect to the one he intended: it drove decision-making underground (or on to his sofa) and undermined trust between officials who were fearful of their critical and often conflicted thinking, not to mention their private candidness, ever becoming public. In turn, that didn’t help encourage the public to trust what politicians said and did at any level.

In my opinion: there has to be a flexible balance between recommended procedures and best practice and commonsense. That is something that hard and fast rules enforced by draconian penalties does not allow for.

5. Limits to PR codes of conduct

CIPR might want to sign up for a code which is strongly Leveson-compliant, and even enshrine that code in its constitution. That may be fine and suit CIPR. But much PR would go on around that, and as a trade. It may be also that PR firms could make some of their contracts “Leveson-complaint/Professional” and others more “Dark Arts/Trade”, or at least keep them free of restrictive codes: say abroad or outside of the public sector in the UK. Some PR pros might sign up to CIPR’s codes as a cover for their intention to continue indulging the dark arts - until you expel them and thus they lose their CIPR (Leveson-approved) kite-mark.

The real dilemma is, however, that because PR is a trade, you cannot stop PRs from being PRs because they break a particular code; whereas, by contrast, doctors and lawyers can be struck off and legally prevented from practicing their profession. A profession is a compulsory body or it is nothing.

6. Principles and the fundamentals of PR and journalism

There’s an important issue of principle here, too. PR facilitates debate and conversation in democratic countries, as does journalism. It is my contention that both arts should be left open for anybody with an interest, the ability and/or a cause to advocate, to practice without interference from the state and or any (except the barest minimum) legally binding codes specifically governing such activities. That is people (including PRs) should be free to hold public discussions and free to express their opinions in print or elsewhere in public.

My point here should not be mistaken: ethics and morals matter a great deal. Though I have to add a reality check to avoid misunderstanding. When push comes to shove people should be free to do PR or journalism with no more constraint than attaches to the ordinary citizen. Blogger, PR, writer journo: all equal before the law, and as accountable for harassment and libel.

Put another way, it worries me that people who support Leveson’s report seemingly propose (celebrate even) making people who live in the UK less free than people in America.

7. Relevance of Leveson in the globalised digital age

We, as your comment insightfully confirms, agree about how the current changes in the world of modern communication – ones PR pros grasp better than most – will make most of Leveson’s report redundant and unenforcible in the medium term. It is not difficult, then, to imagine how Leveson’s proposals risk making an ass of regulation and/or the law; but also of us if we do not speak out about the dangers ahead. That for me makes a compelling justification – in the interest of honest debate – for us to push back today on any attempts to lumber our trade – not to mention mainstream media and society – with an overly-proscriptive set of rules of engagement.

Therefore, I would hope my seven points reinforce my contention that we should think this stuff through properly before we rush to support Leveson’s proposals. Hence in conclusion I’d like to add a request: I kindly urge CIPR to do more to encourage a wider debate within our ranks about the implications of Leveson’s recommendations for our great trade.

In that spirit, I hope that this exchange of views receives a positive response.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Seaman,

Editor,  21st Century PR Issues

So far I am with David Cameron and find support in the majority of each of the responses by almost all the intelligent right and by some boldly liberal others including Max Hastings, David Aaronovitch, Ian Hislop, Liberty, Camilla Cavendish, Peter Lilley, John Whittingdale, Chris Blackhurst, Fraser Nelson. Their shared bottom line is to keep the state out of it: that one wants the least, smartest regulation possible.

The broadly and boldly liberal (as in freedom-loving) view of Leveson seems to be that he has reached too soon for state intervention. Liberals are looking for one or more silver bullets. Beefed-up voluntary regulation looks the right way to go. Only serious failure of a new such (broadly “Leveson compliant”) system should require anything which amounts to state licensing of the press.

Here are one or two thoughts of my own:

The key problems with the Leveson solution are that (1) it seeks to regulate the whole press as though it weren’t just the tabloid vulgarians who were at fault; (2) its “whole print journalism industry” approach misses the main modern problem which will be online and (3) its statutory backup is so light that though it intrudes the state into the matter it tells us nothing about what the state would do in the face of continued bad behaviour by the press.

Hacking, corruption of public office (police leaks, etc), and some harassment can be dealt with by existing or specific new criminal laws. Many other failings, especially kow-towing to the press by politicians, can be dealt with by changes of culture. The existence of a loud “victim-compliant” Hacked-off movement is a powerful new element in old-press if not new media regulation. (Isn’t Hacked-off as good a “validator” as Ofcom could devise?)

There remains the problem of victim redress. Any non-statutory system will have to pass the interlocking Watson and the Mosley tests. (That is: would the Watsons have been spared or compensated for the kind of coverage their dead daughter received? And could we be sure that the Max Mosley S & M story would not have surfaced at all – the “genie out of the bottle” dimension?)

We don’t know if the McAlpine solution will tame the new media. Max Mosley so far seems to think Leveson doesn’t tame rich putative libellers. (Thank goodness for rich, stroppy men.)

One serious problem with Leveson is that it supposes that one can write a law which makes the cost of libel cases potentially much higher if one doesn’t register and get validated by the state. That is a carrot to an organisation accepting state licence and seeking convenience with or without principle but it is a stick (and maybe a serious deterrent) to those who resist state licensing, and especially to those who resist registering on principle (which will often be small outfits (such as, maybe, Private Eye, The Spectator)).

One interesting wrinkle is that Leveson suggests that Ofcom could be a useful regulator: this is to bring the press under the body which regulates the absurdity which is broadcast impartiality. Instead of making the broadcasters more like the press, which would be desirable, this looks a little like making the press more like the broadcasters, which is eerie.

I write all this as someone who watched a lot of Leveson live and had high hopes for him, but hasn’t yet read a word of his report. So far, from reports of his report, I have an impression of a man short of street smarts and trapped by the seeming logic of the failure of all previous Great and Good efforts at press reform. There remains the possibility that it is a much more persuasive report than has so far been suggested.

There is no disputing that the scientists and public official concerned muddled their risk communications. At a press conference, the chance of a large earthquake was described by earth scientist Enzo Boschi,  former head of the national Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, as “unlikely” but not impossible. After the press conference, Department of Civil Protection official Bernardo De Bernardinis went on the record saying there was “no danger”.

It is not hard to imagine how the importantly divergent messages first left the public bewildered and then feeling let down when the devastating earthquake struck.

But what can we learn from this debacle?

The verdict is unsound

The Italian judge’s verdict was apparently premised on his conclusion that the seven defendants didn’t adequately warn the public of the dangers of a large-scale earthquake. This pre-supposes that there was a known truth – or known hazard – to be communicated and that it was withheld either deliberately or by negligence. But as Seth Stein, a professor of Earth sciences at Northwestern University in Illinois, told Scientific American, our ability to predict earthquake hazards is, frankly, lousy, so “criminalizing something would only make sense if we really knew how to do this and someone did it wrong.” Exactly. The problem, however, is that the public knows little about earthquake science. Citizens of L’Aquila most likely thought society’s scientists and officials had rather more to contribute to the situation than saying the equivalent of “we’ve no way of knowing the level of risk we face right now but we can hazard an opinion which is open to fatal misinterpretation”.

The risk of ritualised risk management

The irony of the case is that the scientists were called in to counter a developing sense of panic that had set in L’Aquila (see here). Hence, perhaps, the biggest mistake in L’Aquila was to place too much focus on the urgent opinions of scientists in response to recent tremors and growing public fears. I fathom that this raised expectations of what could be learned from their intervention. The intense interest in the scientists’ nuanced opinions fueled a frenzied and ritualised media circus that sought to feed on public anxiety over increased seismic activity. But the scientists knew from the beginning they were being asked to answer questions they couldn’t usefully answer.

There was nothing worthwhile for scientists to say about the (imminent) probability of a major earthquake and about its implications for decision-making and public safety. Moreover, what was said (including trying to explain the complexities of seismology in press conferences) became a hostage to fortune.

The alternative, long-term approach, would have been to educate the public properly. That calls for the constant restatement of the reasons why they need to remain calm in the face of the unpredictable, but nevertheless predictably small risks (as in small chance of a major convulsion) they face everyday. (It is widely reported that this is the Japanese approach.)

Scientists are not gods

However, the Italian judge, in common with the media and most of the public, seemingly believes that science is about discovering and communicating truths, including those relating to natural hazards. It is not quite that simple. Science is mostly about accumulating evidence in support of hypotheses. There’s a complicated – and ever changing – relationship between what we do know with great certainty about the natural world and the things about which we cannot be certain. Therefore, some scepticism and tolerance is called for on the part of the public and some humility on the part of scientists. As Francis Bacon put it:

Those who have taken upon them to lay down the law of Nature as a thing already searched out and understood, whether they have spoken in simple assurance or professional affectation, have therein done philosophy and the sciences great injury. For as they have been successful in inducing belief so they have been effective in quenching and stopping inquiry; and have done more harm by spoiling and putting an end to other men’s efforts than good by their own. (Novum Organum)

Over-egging versus being over-reassuring

The trick for risk communicators, including scientists, public officials and PRs, is to avoid the twin evils of over-claimed reassurance (John Gummer and BSE, and the L’Aquila public officials) and over-claimed catastrophism.

An amusing case study of the danger of over-egging risks was the WHO’s response to the swine flu pandemic in 2009. A recent report in The Lancet lamented the fact that just 2% of Britons said they avoided hugging or kissing family or friends compared with 46% of those questioned in Mexico and 21% in the US. As the BBC commented:

You may be asking why all this matters at all, given that the vast majority who got swine flu experienced a mild illness? It matters because there are plenty of other bugs out there that will happily hitch a ride on our skin and up our nostrils.

That point is vital to grasp because the seven Italians have been jailed because they did the opposite. As the BBC puts it, they were found guilty of portraying an “inadequate characterisation of the risks; of being [with the benefit of hindsight] misleadingly reassuring about the dangers that faced their city.” The problem is that, as the public’s relaxed response to swine flu suggests, if we cry wolf too often (just in case the worst does happen) that risks demolishing the credibility and trust the public puts in official advice in genuine emergency situations. Equally, after L’Aquila the voice of authoritative reassurance has taken a credibility blow in the public arena.

The blame game is unavoidable

Whenever there is an accident and property is damaged, the environment polluted or people killed as a result of nature’s force or man’s activities, or from a combination of both, somebody is likely to be held legally liable. It is as if there is no such thing as an accidental accident any more. Well, actually, there’s some truth to that belief.

Most accidents are down to human failure. For example, modern buildings, including nuclear power stations, can be built so as to survive earthquakes and tsunamis. So one wonders whether L’Aquila’s town planners had been vigilant enough and how much criticism should be laid at their door. Then again, making mistakes should be something we learn from rather than routinely and brutally criminalise when things go wrong. I hope you see what I’m getting at; getting the balance right is tricky.

There’s no magic formula for crisis communication

I’m afraid that none of what I’ve said amounts to a blueprint for managing risk communication challenges. I rather like to think that blueprints (overdone planning and prejudicial pre-suppositions) are unhelpful because it risks ritualising communication; at L’Aquila that manifested itself in calling in the experts and over-egging their significance. Instead, we need to learn from experience and apply knack, wisdom and judgement to each specific case of risk management. We also need to acknowledge maturely that shit happens.

And, second, why did anyone anywhere near the top of a journalistic organisation nurture the idea that Newsnight’s investigation could disappear merely because it wasn’t broadcast? I think the answers to both questions are typically BBC, and especially as it now is. And so we get to a third question: didn’t the BBC see that the Chinese walls of rectitude might become the silos of self-destructive departmentalism?

Jimmy Savile’s image

The BBC seems to me to be run by over-educated aparatchics of the liberal elite who have tripped up over their clip-boards. They’d got their precious process and accountability and integrity so battened down, they couldn’t spot an enormous shit-storm as it headed toward them. One might say that they had so organised themselves as never to have another Andrew Gilligan or a Russell Brand that they could not see an enormous Jimmy Savile.

Of course, I don’t know for sure. I’m not there and I don’t see the BBC close-up at any level above receptionists, more or less larky researchers and interns, gofer junior producers, and the occasional glimpse at more or less leathery or wary presenters. Sometimes by chance or in the distance I see senior producers and executives and they have never, so far, failed to unimpress. I see how an Evan Davis (“Built In Britain”) or a Stephanie Flanders (“Masters of Money”) can break out and set a real style and say something quite or very real: a strong personality can poke through the miasma. And the miasma is not frightful or wicked, it’s just a bit ho-hum and a turn-off. I can see how a generational change will work well, and that may be all that’s needed: time. But I do still think the whole institution needs to be dumped.

I have for several years believed that we ought to “Scrap the BBC!” (the title of my book along those lines). Oddly, it’s no fun watching the BBC’s upper reaches reveal themselves as clots. I do sourly note that they’ve never done me any favours. More loftily I do think they have not been good for the BBC or broadcasting. But more to the point of my book: I wonder if the problem of the rule by clip-board is an inevitable function of what I dislike about the BBC as an institution. You see, I am not very interested in how the BBC happens to be run at the moment; but in whether an over-regulated, poll tax-funded behemoth could ever be run well.

That the present clip-boards are in charge fits well with the BBC’s structure and role, but is such ghastliness in one form or another inevitable until we stop cosseting and corseting such a beast?

The answer to that question is probably, yes. In other words, whether one sacked or kept Entwhistle, Rippon and Patten (and whether one lauded Thompson or not) the BBC would remain an over-mighty, smug, pseudo-dissident redundancy from another age. Indeed, I am inclined to leave the BBC’s top brass exactly where they are. They are adept at learning mantras and new tricks: they’ll learn fairly decent responses  to their present predicament. And leaving them in place would have the merit of denying scalps to the media and our silly Select Committees (heaven forfend I should ever see them so).

By the way, it is fairly easy to see how Jimmy Savile got away with his behaviour. Crucially, as many people have noted, he hid in plain sight. But it is important that NHS people assumed Savile must be alright if the BBC thought he was; and the BBC thought he must be alright if the NHS thought he was. Since I’d like to see the back of both monoliths, I might make a cheap point here. I won’t, because it is more important to note that it is terribly easy for different worlds to misunderstand each other and let good sense slip down the gaps between them. That kind of thing could happen, even if we grow out of state-sponsored corporatism, unless people keep asking themselves very awkward, worldly-wise questions (whilst not becoming cynical – and that’s not an easy trick: BBC Moral Maze).

I think there are very strong elements in the writing on this subject from Peter Oborne (good on BBC clip-boardery), Matthew d’Ancona (good on Savile’s playing institutions against each other), and Simon Jenkins (good on the absurdity of some modern inquiries in The Jimmy Savile witch-hunt sets us on a path to paranoia). I disagree with bits of their differing analyses, but take great comfort from our having such stuff.

This essay interrogates the response of leading academics, especially Jim Grunig, as they aimed to build an idea of PR fit for the post-modern, reflexive, inter-active, wisdom-of-crowds, stakeholder society environment they studied.

As the post Second World War euphoria fizzled out into new-age angst, the late 60s and 70s saw optimism turned into scepticism about progress and industrial development. Protest movements arose that questioned the “military-industrial” complex of white-coated experts motivated by profit. Capitalism, they claimed, was destroying the planet.

Their sentiments were reinforced in works that examined the consequences of economic growth critically, such as John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1957); Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957); Ralph Nader’s 1959 savaging of an American icon and dream in ‘The Safe Car You Can’t Buy’ in The Nation; The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961); and not least, E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful (1973). Other books, such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), poured scorn on the environmental consequences of modern society, which helped ignite the passion behind Greenpeace (1971).

Real world events appeared to confirm the campaigners’ pessimistic assessment of the world’s and mankind’s state. Major industrial accidents such as the Torrey Canyon (1969), Three Mile Island (1979), Bhopal (1984) and Chernobyl (1986) spooked the world. There was talk of peak oil and gas and other natural limits to economic growth and development. Later came the threat of global warming and much more. They became indelible symbols of man’s folly; serving as proof points among anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-technology campaigners, of the validity of their views.

Within the nascent environmental movement of the 1970s were the seeds of the new radical politics of the 1990s. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, anti-capitalist sentiment took on different dimensions. Communism, socialism, trade unions and the peace movement rapidly lost their credibility and relevance. New militant forces emerged in their place, consisting of politicised greens aligned with anti-globalisation protesters.

There was a feeling – one shared by protesters and serious thinkers – that major corporations had helped undermine the sense of community which held society together. The growth of shopping malls on city outskirts was denounced by campaigners for turning town centers into decrepit zones inhabited by criminals. The likes the US’s WalMart and the UK’s Tesco became liberal bête noires. It was argued that the corporate and major institutions in society were suffering from a core values crisis and, as a result, a trust deficit.

In the 1990s, from global warming to globalisation, the PR trade’s clients – particularly large multi-national companies – found themselves on the receiving end of a hostile crowd’s anger. The aims of this diverse coalition of protesters were popularised in compelling best-selling books that struck a blow at brand value, consumerism and globalisation, such as Naomi Klein’s NoLogo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (1999) and Noreena Hertz’s The Silent Takeover: Global capitalism and the death of democracy (2001).

The anti-globalisation protest peaked during the Battle of Seattle outside the World Trade Organisation’s ministerial meeting in 1999. In scenes reminiscent of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s, Seattle’s air was filled with tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets as militant demonstrators clashed with police. Protesters chained themselves together at street crossings to block the way of arriving delegates. One group even managed to disrupt the opening ceremony. Elsewhere mobs roamed the city smashing windows, singling out Starbucks’ coffee stores for special attention. A civil emergency was declared. The National Guard took control and enforced a curfew. More than 600 people were arrested from the 40 000 or so protesters.

Seattle was the most extreme of many such outbursts across the world. Similar riots took place outside major international conferences of bodies such as the World Economic Forum, the G8, EU and even the UN conferences on global warming. It was as if no international conference was safe from the mob.

It was feared that corporations and governments were losing their grip on public opinion because their ethics and morals were not the same as the audience’s. But the anti-globalisation lobby became more subdued after 9/11 and more still after the global credit crunch was followed by a global recession.

Today what needs explaining by the anti-globalisation lobby is that globalisation is more in demand now than ever in the developing world. Indeed, the very fact that global economies boomed mostly from the 1980s onward suggests that the masses of the world embraced globalisation enthusiastically. They adopted new technologies such as mobile phones, IT, internet, CDs, DVDs, GMOs and bought more cheapened old ones such as air travel and cars etc.

Therefore, while the green anti-corporate and anti-growth sentiments we’ve just reviewed capture an important mood within society, it would be wrong to see them as reflecting the popular will. We must challenge whether the protesters ever deserved the attention they received, and whether they ever represented public opinion.

The problem has been, however, that the mass public has had little influence over the main debate, which, as a result, has been very one-sided and mostly in favour of the activists.

Meeting little resistance in the media, which largely shared the protesters’ anti-establishment views, the prejudices directed against mass consumption, mass consumers and the merits of economic growth became increasingly ingrained within elite society. Even boardrooms and (particularly) politicians began to fall under the spell of the onslaught. Here’s just two examples of how this expresses itself today.

Ian Cheshire, CEO of Kingfisher, Europe’s leading home improvement retailer, opined at Davos 2012 that: “we have to get consumers in developing countries past wanting the “American Dream of more.”’ Politicians in the West are increasingly keen to tell us that increasing gross domestic happiness (as defined by their gurus) is more important than increasing our gross domestic product.

So the protesters may not have convinced the public, whom they held in contempt for their backward aspirations, but they did gain considerable influence among the C-suite, academia, the media and politicians. Their gloomy middle class, risk adverse, anti-capitalist, green backlash acquired clout.

Dead-end search for models

Recognising the challenge in the 1980s and early 1990s were two PR academics, Jim Grunig, Professor Emeritus for the Department of Communication at University of Maryland, and Todd Hunt, Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University School of Communication. They came together with their peers in an attempt to find the key to reconnect corporate America with its public, and on a more ambitious scale the American nation with world opinion. At the same time they sought to address the low esteem PR was held in. They believed PR required a model that would define it as a proper profession and explain its role and behaviour to both the public and clients.

In their view, the absence of a progressive model was holding PR back; a model being a simplified representation of reality. They reasoned that one was required to transform PR into an acknowledged ethical, credible, trustworthy profession. They thought this was required to help head off activist protests and to put public relations professionals (let’s just call them ‘PRs’) at the head of the corporate pyramid with the C-suite.

The intention of Grunig and his supporters was to position public relations beyond advocacy. They felt that self-interest was not the exclusive motivation that PRs should focus on. They said it had to be combined with concern for others and for the impact an organisation’s behaviour had on the environment. In short, they wanted to produce a model of PR that could be used to balance corporate self-interest with the public interest, or with the interest of others.

In their 1984 classic Managing Public Relations, Grunig and Hunt put forward four models of public relations which encompassed its historical and current practice:

The first was a one-way communication model based on media relations, or press agentry, which seeks to get favourable coverage by either ethical or unethical means, depending on the practitioner’s standards.

The second was the public information model which is a one-way communication process where the PR acts as a conduit for distributing the client’s news.

The third was the asymmetrical model, which could be two-way or one-way, which uses persuasion and manipulation, backed by research, to bend the wills of an audience the client’s way in a process.

The fourth (the preferred model) was two-way symmetrical communication in which PRs resolve conflict by promoting mutual understanding and respect between the organisation and their public(s). The objective here, according to Grunig, was to use research and dialogue to bring about symbiotic changes of ideas, attitudes and behaviours of both audiences and organisations.

The two-way symmetrical model was, of course, an idealised model for PR practice that sought to separate it from its persuasive, propaganda and (supposedly) one-sided roots.

The preferred model was a very natural and legitimate attempt by PR practitioners to manage their own reputations. It was, though, not just mistaken, but a dangerous corrosive approach to engaging the public.

What’s interesting is how Grunig defined the public, which, he said, “can be identified and classified in the context to which they are aware of the problem and the extent to which they do something about the problem.” That effectively conflates the term public with activists, often militant anti-capitalist ones at that. Hence Grunig’s style of PR accepts the terms of discussion – the symbols and stereotypes – from the activists. It ends up perverting institutions by urging them to develop their narratives in a way that is out of sync with the public opinion of the silent majority.

The two-way symmetrical model of PR rests on a number of assumptions that require interrogation. It positions PRs as mediators between their clients and their publics. Rather grandly it supposes that PRs are the moral keepers of their organisations. With this model PR gives the target audience equal status to the paymaster. The objective is to ensure that no side dominates the communication process and all sides’ views are treated on level terms. To ensure fairness it assumes that both sides agree to abide by a set of rules which can be audited transparently to ensure compliance.

Its proponents claim that this approach is ethical because it empowers PRs to organise how the dialogue is conducted, or at least to negotiate the terms of engagement. Jim Grunig sums it up thus:

“To be successful, however, they [PRs] must be able to convince their client organizations and publics that a symmetrical approach will enhance their self-interests more than will an asymmetrical approach and, at the same time, that it will enhance their reputations as ethical, socially responsible organizations and publics.”

[Two-way Symmetrical Public Relations, Past. Present and Future, Jim Grunig, page 18 in Public Relations Handbook.]

For the model to work, rigorous research of their target audiences’ views is required. This information is then used by PRs. Ironically, knowledge is power and the more money one has the more research becomes possible. This fact clearly undermines Grunig’s proposition that PRs could mediate effectively between their clients and their publics in an objective and neutral manner. It scuppers the stated intent that neither side should control the perception of the other side’s ideas and viewpoints.

Hence Grunig has since been forced to revise his model representation of reality. To his credit, he accepted that his idealistic social perspective of PRs role in society took no account of the PR’s motives (PR is paid for by only one side of the relationship). In response, he put forward a compromise that acknowledged mixed motive communication.

Professor Grunig re-cast his theory by arguing that two-way symmetry is a process not an outcome: as if he wishes to conflate means with ends.

The problem here is that Grunig’s faith in processes risks encouraging PRs to produce formulaic procedures and conventions that actually restrict conversation and debate (see my critique of the Stockholm Accords here). He also seems not to grasp that means serve an end and that to devise the appropriate means we must first know what we want to achieve. The accusation has to be made, then, that Grunig’s approach is in danger of obuscating corporate ends in the process.

That said, there’s no doubt that we PRs do, as Grunig suggests, sometimes (and would like to do so often) influence client and stakeholder behaviour for the better in the process of fulfilling objectives. So, yes, organisations must continually interrogate their objectives, values and behaviour in the light of real-world developments and readjust when necessary. But processes should follow and play second fiddle to objectives, not vice versa, partly for obvious reasons of logic, but also because it provides the only means for an organisation to retain any sense of direction. Indeed, it is worth reminding ourselves that leaderless companies and dictatorial societies both tend to become obsessed with bureaucracy and processes at the expense of reason.

Grunig’s amended objective is not so much focused on reaching a consensus with activists (which is fine given how unrepresentative they mostly are) as on collaboration and conducting a dialogue. He defined his new take as a discourse designed to balance the private and public interest; which are two very difficult things to define objectively, particularly by PRs serving clients. Commenting on how the re-jigged models aligned, he wrote:

“Rather than placing the two-way asymmetrical model at one end of a continuum and the two-way symmetrical model at the other end….. A public relations strategy at either end would favor the interests of either the organization or the public to the exclusion of the other…..The middle of the continuum contains a symmetrical win-win zone where organizations and publics engage in mixed-motive communication.

“With this new model of combined two-way public relations, the difference between mixed motive and two-way symmetrical models disappears. In fact, describing the symmetrical model as a mixed motive games resolves the criticism that the symmetrical model forces the organization to sacrifice its interests to those of the public.” [Ibid, page 25]

Mixed motive communication then becomes a collaborative advocacy (the cooperative dance as Sandra Macleod likes to say) that describes what Grunig likes to call a cooperative antagonism (which he accepts involves two-way asymmetrical communication as being inherent to the process).

Grunig’s philosophical pretensions

The idea Grunig posits as being practical and ethical is that all the players retain their uniqueness and self-interest in the process of negotiation. In support of this notion, Grunig calls for help from a leading Marxist semiotics and structuralist theoretician by the name of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. He maintained that the essential quality of a dialogue is the simultaneous fusion or unity of multiple voices. However each voice retains its uniqueness and there’s an ongoing dynamic tension with and differentiation from the Other. It is from this understanding that Jim Grunig comes to redefine what public relations is about, thus:

“Simultaneous fusion with the Other while retaining the uniqueness of one’s self-interest seems to describe well the challenge of symmetrical public relations.” [Ibid, p28.]

This approach to PR supposedly draws on Kantian philosophy. This reminds us, in the tradition of humanism, that stakeholders (any humans, actually, rather than just those PRs define as being relevant to their purpose) are ends-in-themselves, rather than a means to an end. The views of the philosopher Jurgen Habermas are also cited in an attempt to give the model bottom. Habermas maintains that dialogue and not monologue is essential to mutual human understanding.

Grunig, in common with many PR thinkers, mistakenly believes that PR is about establishing mutual understanding between publics and their clients. Actually, PR is about advocacy on behalf of clients and achieving client objectives, something that achieving mutual understanding may or may not help. It isn’t necessarily necessary, for instance, that firms understand campaigners or campaigners understand firms. PR’s customers usually hope that – one way or another – their activities come to be accepted. They are dealing with real life challenges; not in a seminar. Nor is it all that obvious that a self-improving firm, anxious to be a good world citizen, should assume that it only has to get into an understanding with its critics to achieve its goal.

Anyway, Grunig has proposed that PRs, their clients and their opponents, retain a get out of jail card. He says that if after dialogue one side cannot accommodate the other it can disengage ethically from the symmetrical process. Of course, failure and the perception of the other side’s willingness to cooperate is a subjective matter. This joker in Grunig’s pack rather suggests that persuasion and getting one’s own way lie at the heart of his game-plan; at the end of the day by any means possible (within the law, of course). Indeed, Grunig tries to make a “virtue” of this motivation:

“…we have stated consistently that the symmetrical model serves the self-interest of the organization better than an asymmetrical model because ‘organizations get more of what they want when they give up some of what they want.’” [Ibid]

Where there’s a clash of seemingly irreconcilable forces over issues, such as pro- versus anti-abortionist, ditto nuclear power, ditto GMOs, and so on, Grunig’s symmetry runs aground. That’s because there really are fundamental differences in the opposing cases: these are existential and can’t be moderated away. Hence Grunig accepts that two-way PR becomes virtually impossible (except at the margins) when negotiating between two publics with diametrically opposed moral viewpoints. This is so with pro and anti-abortionists, for instance, or when anti-trust laws prevent collusion. So it is unfair to say that he is totally idealistic.

It is in the murky space where deals can be made that Grunig’s approach to PR becomes risky. Even when compromises can be reached, the obsession with engaging activists in a cooperative dance has very often eaten away at the values, self-confidence, self-belief, integrity and identity of organisations; as it did when BP said it had gone Beyond Petroleum (a change which was both skin-deep and corrosive).

Grunig rightly says that persuasion is indeed what PRs do but that the persuasion of PRs cuts two ways:

“If persuasion occurs, the public should be just as likely to persuade the organization management to change attitudes or behavior as the organization is likely to change the public’s attitude of behavior.” [Ibid]

Sure, we can all agree that compromise is part of life. Compromise is necessary, and perfectly normal, regardless of the form or model of communication an organisation chooses to adopt. But the premises Grunig advances allows protesters or activist publics to set agendas and risks persuading an organisation (our clients) to give up something that is perfectly legitimate. Arguably this happened when Shell was persuaded to abandon dumping its Brent Spar oil platform deep at sea: the upshot was a less ecologically-sound solution. The regulator and the corporation had had the right idea in the first place and trust in both was eroded – not bolstered – by their giving in to emotionalism.

Contrary to what Grunig’s supporters say, the asymmetrical models of PR are not awful, if they are good descriptions of how different sorts of PR actually work. But they are a rather clumsy way of arriving at one idea (or ideal) of what PR excellence might be like: a symmetrical two-way process in which power is equal between the two parties, and so is the flow of argument and respect.

This begs many questions. It is indeed often wise for negotiators (which is what PRs are in the symmetrical two way process) to assume that the other party’s case is real and serious at least to the party which holds it. But that way lies relativism. It may be intellectually dishonest and dangerous in other ways too (for instance, assuming your opponent is rational and sincere may not be wise when she or he is idiotic, lying and or prone to terrorism). Such relativism, from left-wing critics of Grunig, led some PR academics to make excuses for terrorism, as if supposedly hegemonic asymmetrical PR were to blame:

“Yet we would also argue, in agreement with Deetz (1992) and Philo and Miller (2001), that Western corporate capitalism has succeeded in dominating the range of discourses, and indeed our material practices to such an extent that it is difficult for alternative discourses and practices to rise to any level of ascendancy without violence – as the 9/11 attack on the World trade Center demonstrated. Those attacks can be understood as an attempt to make America and Europe by attention to accumulated Muslim resentments against a history of western prejudice, exploitation, and anti-Muslim foreign policy in the Middle East”

[Source: "From propaganda to discourse", by Weaver, Motion and Roper in Critical perspectives in public relations; International Thomson Business Press, London, 2006]

The assumption here is that the “other side’s” claims are legitimate. It is also worth noting that no rational explanation has been given for 9/11 and that those that have been provided have been totally contradictory. Terrorism is nihilistic. It is not prone to rational explanation or interpretation. Blaming the West for 9/11 says more about the prejudices, and keenness to denigrate our modern societies (and too often our clients as well), on the part of the PRs who make such comments, than it tells us about the motivation of terrorists.

Grunig is not the problem

I’m almost sorry to focus on Grunig. He is capable of nuance and anyway was not the instigator of the problem he is part of. Rather, he is the clearest in laying out his premises and arguments. His map of the PR dilemmas is the best we have. The kind of ideas which he outlines are indeed the kind which have become all too popular. The view that partisan PR – paid for by bosses of any sort – is unethical is widespread. Even critics of Grunig’s theories such as Dr Jacquie L’Etang share his distaste for positioning PRs as advocates:

“Only if practitioners engage with such [ethical and political] issues can they avoid the charges of superficiality and cynical exploitation of target audiences. The role of public relations itself is shown to be necessarily partisan and, furthermore, by operating on behalf of certain interests, intrinsically undemocratic…”

[L'Etang, J.  "Corporate responsibility and public relations ethics", in J. L'Etang and M. Pieczka, eds., Critical Perspectives in Public Relations; International Thomson Business Press, London, 1996, pages 82–105]

This stance from L’Etang highlights the major problem within PR circles. It displays an intrinsic dislike of what PR is about: advocacy on behalf of clients. It also reveals a complete failure to grasp what democracy is about and where PR fits in. Democracy is all about the pursuit of self-interest on the part of certain interest groups. Democracy (which takes different forms) is merely the framework within which conflicts are resolved and different interests pursue their interests: it sets down the limits to how conflicts are fought. Democracy provides the means for settling differences politically, legally (constitutionally) in a manner that is ultimately accountable to and definable by the people.

L’Etang suggests PR hogs the available space for public debate in the public sphere, squeezing out alternative voices, and that’s what makes it reactionary (page 98 ibid). Yet that space is potentially infinite because it is created by the participants. If the existing space for debate is narrow that just reflects the lack of mass public engagement in the battle of ideas. We should note that the public was not always so passive as it is today, and its mood might change as times change.

Meanwhile, in contrast to what L’Etang suggests, public debate in today’s mainstream mass media favours (mostly unrepresentative) protesters far more than it does corporations such as Monsanto, McDonald’s, Dow Chemical, BP, Barclays and the like.

None of the above should be taken as an inducement to firms to be anything other than morally alert. Contrariwise: my point is that firm should be more alert, not less. That’s why I put such a high value on truth-telling. The Financial Times‘s Martin Sandbu summed it up well in his recent piece (Aristotle – the banker’s best friend):

….moral philosophers have granted impunity to lazy thinking. And the result is a debate soaked in such inanities as “giving back to society” or putting “people before profit.” Fine phrases, but they mean little and in practice will achieve even less. Most attacks on business immorality conjure up villains in corporate boardrooms plotting their next evil deed. The real problem is harder. Most business people are like most people everywhere: wanting to do the right thing but confused about what the right thing is in a complex world.”

He goes on:

“… one may question whether corporate conduct must be justified by its social usefulness. Is business really responsible for the common good? Or is it enough to respect the rights of others while pursuing profits? To ask that question – surely a fundamental one – is to enter a big philosophical debate midstream, for which reading John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant is better preparation than any number of management books.” [see my: Cant or Kant? PR-think gets heavy (part 1) and (part 2) Cant or Kant? PR-think gets heavy]

Setting higher expectations

The real problem is that PRs have endorsed many of Grunig’s premises, even while rejecting his theories as being impractical. That’s because too many PRs share the protesters’ criticisms of modern society.

Over the years, the Grunig perspective (some call it a paradigm) on how to manage perceptions and reputations has been adapted subtly in PR circles. It has resurfaced as stakeholder doctrine, CSR, sustainability and precautionary risk mantras, which emphasize listening (to placard wavers and other protesters etc.) over leadership. One can read the narrative in Edelman’s Trust Barometer conclusions, and in initiatives such as the Stockholm Accords (see here here here here and here). It is an outlook which pretends that all stakeholders are equal. It is an arm of PR which claims organisations don’t serve their owners or founders or exist to fulfill their core purpose first and foremost.

My point is that PRs need to get beyond recommending to their clients that they outsource their reputations for NGO imprimatur. PRs should also stop advocating that firms and institutions redefine their social purpose to comply with ever-changing NGO agendas (read soft-left, liberal and often anti-corporate activists). PRs should be helping firms and modern institutions establish their integrity and reputations based on their own merits. The challenge should be to define corporate aims and ambitions and to communicate what corporations exist to do. For example, instead of advising the likes of BP to rebrand themselves Beyond Petroleum, they should help them stand for something they really believe in, that reflects their core purpose, such as Better Petroleum.

Hence, PR’s paymasters should ask some tough questions and set higher expectations. The role of PR should be to help corporations develop and communicate a solid corporate culture.

It is my contention that PRs have helped create the climate of cynicism and lack of confidence that so bedevils Western society. They have helped put it at a disadvantage to the BRICs by their failure to speak robustly and honestly to their publics. In other words, the PR industry’s leading academics have in a sense deprived the industry of what it really needs to be taken seriously as a profession: self-esteem and self-respect for its own contribution and that of its clients.

For instance, it has hardly been remarked upon by PRs that supposedly, according to Edelman’s Trust Barometer of 2010, China has the most trusted media and government on earth; its businesses are more trusted than the US’s; Russian businesses are supposedly more trusted than France’s and Germany’s; or that the Russian government is as trusted as the UK’s (see also my Reflections on Edelman’s 2012 Trust Survey). The findings should serve as reality check: but right now they don’t.

It is time Western PR got real. It is time it got beyond trying to construct trite idealised models. PRs should become less defensive and apologetic about managing the messy perceptions and realities that resound in our modern democracies. It is time that PR became part of the solution; a catalyst for economic growth, by advocating the benefits of risk, innovation and progress on behalf of clients. It is time our trade grew up.

Note: this essay was inspired by a review of the best of 2010 PR books by Richard Bailey on his useful PR Studies blog.

Anybody wanting to know about my views on the issues above can read A Sorry State: Self-denigration in British Culture, edited by Peter Whittle, foreword by the historian Michael Burleigh, published by The New Culture Forum, November 2010. My essay there is entitled, “How public relations sells western firms short” (available from Amazon online).

It is the tale of the Peruvian Amazonian Rubber Company, which, in a shimmy much copied by modern branding gurus, later renamed itself minus the R-word to distance itself from the appalling reputation the rubber industry earned in the Congo. The ‘Peruvian Amazonian Company’, owned by Julio César Arana, operated in a stateless region known as ‘The Putumayo’, after the river of the same name, where its law ruled over the vast contested borders of Peru, Colombia and Ecuador.

From 1907, first in the Peruvian press and later in London’s and Washington’s, the company and its London-based board of directors were pilloried in the court of public opinion for orchestrating human rights abuses on a grand scale. Six years later they were found guilty by the British and American authorities, who in response set out the principles of corporate responsibility, accountability and governance that have influenced our expectations ever since.

One of Hardenburg’s photos

The scandal involved colourful characters. There was Julio César Arana, a businessman who went from selling fancy hats on the Amazon to being an infamous Peruvian rubber baron. Then there was Walter Ernest Hardenburg, a youthful American adventure tourist, who stumbled upon the secret world of Arana’s brutal rubber empire deep in the Amazon. There was also Sir Roger Casement. He had already exposed the rubber business in King Leopold’s Belgian Congo. (In a twist of fate, the British executed Sir Roger for treason in 1916 for conspiring with Irish rebels.) At the company’s head office in London there was Mr. H. L. Gielgud. He became the first PR spokesperson ever to be made ‘secretary and manager’ of a major international corporation during a major existential crisis that had global dimensions.

The background to the story was the roaring rubber trade from 1870 to 1914, which was focused mainly on the Congo and the Amazon where wild rubber trees grew in large numbers. In the Putumayo, out of reach of legal constraints and prying eyes, Arana became obsessed with satisfying the demand generated by modern innovations such as bicycles, automobiles, galoshes and telegraph wiring. Demand for rubber was so strong that his cargo ships stuffed with it would often gain in value between departure and arrival.

But Hardenburg’s account of extreme immoral behaviour in the Amazon was almost beyond imagination in 20th century London and Washington. He claimed Indians were slaves who received no pay; they were kept naked; they were robbed of their women and children; there were floggings and killings, some of which involved crucification head downwards; ears, fingers, arms, legs and testicles were sometimes cut off as punishment; there was no medical treatment.

Such was the disbelief – and fear of libel actions – that mainstream British media initially refused to publish Hardenburg’s account. It was only London’s anti-slavery magazine Truth that was willing to take the first risk (backed later by the Manchester Guardian) of supporting his story. It opened its campaign in 1909 with the shocking headline, ‘The Devil’s Paradise: a British-owned Congo’. As Anthony Smith writes in Explorers of the Amazon: ‘Truth did not publish one article: it published the story for week after week, keeping it on the boil’.

The company responded by spreading lies among Truth’s competitors designed to blacken Hardenburg’s character; claiming, among other things, he was a blackmailer who had also forged bills. The competitor most impressed by the company’s response was the Morning Leader, which published uncritically the company’s version of events. But it received a revealing insight of its own into the Peruvian Amazonian Company’s corporate culture, when a representative arrived to say thank you with an envelope (most likely sent by Arana rather than the British directors) full of cash. It was instantly rebuffed. Then in the best tradition of British journalism, the Morning Leader ran a headline the following day which read: ‘Strange Story of a Banknote; Peruvian Amazon Company and the Morning Leader‘.

The British directors, who added a veneer of respectability to Arana’s reputation in the City of London, responded in a slimy manner. They defended the company, sure. They also reminded everybody, as if it were material, that they were not in office when the supposed atrocities took place. Perhaps not knowing what to do, the directors soon latched on to the potential of Mr. H. L. Gielgud, an auditor who had just returned from the region while working for Deloitte, Plender and Griffiths and Co, who was prepared to deny the allegations outright. The grateful directors immediately made him the company’s leading executive, hiking his wage from 150 pounds sterling to 1000 per year. This jumped-up-clerk and wannabe PR-spokesperson went on to represent his firm in the media and at inquiries and to earn 2500 pounds per year. Gielgud even shadowed Sir Roger Casement, who had been selected in 1910 by Sir Edward Grey to lead a mission to investigate the claims, all the way to the Amazon.

In 1913 a House of Commons Select Committee delivered its findings. They were based mainly on statements made by British Barbadians who were employed by the company in the Amazon, as well as by natives (mainly the Huitotos) who were abused. Arana was found to have had ‘knowledge of and responsibility for the atrocities perpetrated by his agents and employees in the Putumayo’. As for British directors, they were absolved of direct responsibility for the atrocities. However, they were censured in a way that remains a lesson and warning to company directors to this day. The MPs concluded that they had harmed the good reputation of England and that ‘Company Directors who merely attend board meetings and sign cheques… cannot escape their share of the collective moral responsibility when gross abuses under their company are revealed’.

This marked the beginning of the era of corporate responsibility and reputation management we are still in. It illustrated how public opinion, which had already abolished slavery in the British empire in 1833, and later rallied against King Leopold in the Congo, was now a force capable of  expressing (in a manner that could not be ignored) its moral outrage against individual corporations on a global scale. There was no longer anywhere to hide, not even deep inside the Amazon. Directors in London and New York could no longer wash their hands of what went on elsewhere in their name. But there was something else, Gielgud’s over-promotion signified how public relations was set to become the most valued corporate skill of all during a corporate crisis.

Further reading:

Four Centuries of Adventure Along The World’s Greatest River – Explorers of The Amazon by Anthony Smith, published by Viking, 1990 (pages – 285- 324)

Roger Casement, Ethnography and the Putumayo by O Siochain, Seamas (1993): http://eprints.nuim.ie/1086/

Terrible Story of Putumayo Rubber. Sir Roger Casement’s Report: http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=OSWCC19120903.2.3&l=mi&e=——-10–1—-0–

Civilized People in Uncivilized Places: Rubber, Race, and Civilization during the Amazonian Rubber Boom (2006) by Jean L. Ruiz, University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, SK,

http://library.usask.ca/theses/available/etd-05202006-230338/unrestricted/Thesis_Jean_Ruiz.pdf

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Document No. 1366 SLAVERY IN PERU MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES TRANSMITTING REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF STATE, WITH ACCOMPANYING PAPERS, CON-CERNING THE ALLEGED EXISTENCE OF SLAVERY IN PERU: http://brittlebooks.library.illinois.edu/brittlebooks_open/Books2009-06/unitst0001slaper/unitst0001slaper_ocr.txt

Full text online: The Putumayo, the devil’s paradise; travels in the Peruvian Amazon region and an account of the atrocities committed upon the Indians therein (1913) by W B Hardenburg  http://www.archive.org/stream/putumayodevilspa00hardrich/putumayodevilspa00hardrich_djvu.txt