When a leading global provider of research on corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) positions ethical banking as a feel good investment package, we should push back. Ethics is about what we ought to do. It is not about what’s expedient and driven by self-interest.

 Read on ›

The UK is currently debating the Transparency of Lobbying, non-Party Campaigning, and Trade Union Administration Bill. So it is worth revisiting the great battle out of which came today’s liberty to influence political debate, politicians and policy outcomes that some claim is now being put in jeopardy. Read on ›

The Transparency of Lobbying, non-Party Campaigning, and Trade Union Administration Bill is soon to be debated in the UK’s houses of parliament. I am with Lord Bell in hating this proposal. But what foxes me is the way my great industry is so Guardianista. My every instinct tells me that this is a sophisticated case of shooting, or at least chaining, the messenger. Read on ›

This second installment of a two-parter on Queen Elizabeth I describes how PR acts in support of leadership and authority using rhetoric’s persuasive powers. It tells the story of the emergence of modern PR practice and the modern world it shaped. (It is work in progress for my book: On Message: Propaganda, persuasion and the PR game.) Read on ›

By Richard D North

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. Read on ›

Here is an on the record briefing about Lord Justice Leveson’s proposals for “improving” the British police’s PR. It begins with the paragraph where Leveson recommends altering the PR lexicon.  Read on ›

Following my piece ‘PRs shouldn’t rush to welcome Leveson‘, Phil Morgan, Director of Policy and Communications at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), kindly responded. His comment and my reply were too detailed to leave in my comments. So here’s a post that starts with his remarks and ends with my response in the form of an open letter to CIPR that explores some more the challenges Leveson’s report poses for PR professionals in the UK.  Read on ›

PR professionals need to interrogate the Leveson report in great detail. That’s because there’s the possibility of another Dangerous Dogs-type Act coming on. In 1991 several high-profile outrages involving fighting dogs biting, maiming and killing babies and old folk were whipped up by the tabloids to create a moral panic. Then emotionally-incontinent parliamentarians rushed through draconian legislation. The result is now acknowledged to have been a disaster for public protection, dogs owners and justice (1). Read on ›

[This essay by James Woudhuysen and Paul Seaman first appeared on spiked-online.] Barack Obama’s victory in the US presidential election looks unlikely to subdue the growing calls, throughout America, for national self-sufficiency in energy. Both candidates tried to sow illusions in what Obama dubbed ‘energy security’ and his opponent Mitt Romney called ‘energy independence’. However, these goals are neither desirable nor, in today’s integrated world economy, possible.  Read on ›

How does a near-European monopolistic vertical supplier (upstream, downstream and in-between) of an expensive fossil fuel from a semi-democratic country convince politicians from proper democracies that competition and significantly lower prices are bad things? Play an emotive PR trump card, that’s how. Read on ›