PR Event: The Media Accused

On Wednesday night the great and the good of PR and Journalism (and a few 'punters') gathered in the LEWIS Media Centre for the 'The Media Accused' event.

The event was centred around the controversial Flat Earth News author and journalist Nick Davies and a panel of media and PR luminaries, gathered to discuss the (alleged) falling standards in the media and the suggestion this has at worst been brought about, and at best been exploited, by the PR industry.

Here are the biogs of the panel:

Nick Davies, author and journalist - Nick Davies has been named Journalist of the Year, Reporter of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year for his investigations into crime, drugs, poverty and other social issues. He writes regularly for the Guardian and also makes TV documentaries; he was formerly an on-screen reporter for World in Action. Nick's latest book Flat Earth News sparked controversy in both the media and PR industries. He joins us tonight to discuss the issues raised.

Jon Bernstein, multimedia editor, Channel 4 News – Jon Bernstein has been with Channel 4 since 2005 when he joined to establish the broadcaster's FactCheck website, set up in the run-up to the UK general election to 'sniff out' political spin. Prior to joining Channel 4, Jon was editor-in-chief of the UK government's DirectGov website as well as being a founding editor of IT news service silicon.com.

Elisabeth Lewis-Jones, president Chartered Institute of Public Relations - Elisabeth Lewis-Jones has 15 years’ experience working both in-house and in consultancy. Elisabeth is a former CIPR Young Communicator of the Year and chair of the CIPR in the Midlands.

Danny Rogers, editor PR Week - Danny Rogers has been editor of the PR industry's bible for three years but has been a leading media and marketing journalist for almost a decade. Danny has been a contributing editor to the Financial Times and Media Guardian, as well as deputy editor for Marketing magazine.

Will Sturgeon, Associate Director of Lewis PR opened the event with a tale of a Jaffa Cake shaped like David Beckham, the point being that this was a bad PR stunt that exploited the press to gain the client press coverage (See Will's take on the event here).

Will then left the floor to let Nick explain the basic concept of his book, creating a background to the debate and also allowing him to plug the book fully before the rest of the panel joined him.

Nick Davies has just bet the audience that the story of the Jersey school is going to turn out to be mostly false. This was due to PR and journalists working together to amplify the story, which started out as something small with little evidence into a much bigger scandal and subsequent newspaper coverage.

The media has become increasingly vulnerable to being manipulated by PR. The change in ownership structure means that all types of media are geared twards profit. Thus, editorial staff have been stripped, forcing juornalist's to cover 3 times the amount of content as previously. Therefore 'Churnalists' don't check their stories, Nick says - in fact, it's just 12% that conduct proper fact checking. According to surveys, in 54% of 'home' news stories, the facts themselves were taken from PR.

PR, Nick says, works skillfully to exploit "the inherent, pathetic structural weaknesses of the way Fleet Street works" (targeted mainly towards Hill & Knowlton, who Davies is not worried about naming and shaming). PR is a manipulative profession, but he admits that PRs are clever and desrve their money!

Nick Davies asks, "Why are we running a flaming torch around the world?" Is it because we need to get the torch around the world easily? No - it's a PR artifice, but one that protest groups will also jump on the back of. The flaming torch becomes a pseudo-event generated by groups to create their own PR.

This is all part of the "structurally vulnerable media" that has made the "PR industry big and skillful". "There is a toxic chemistry at work here," Nick says.

Jon Bernstein, multimedia editor of Channel 4 is challenging the fact in Flat Earth News and journalists are filling three times more space than they did 20 years ago. He says that "It's questionable to come up with figures on editorial numbers" and that the numbers are exaggerated and not as important as Nick thinks.

Danny Rogers argues that we will have a healthy media if journalists and PRs are professional in their practises. He ponits out the irony that Nick Davies is a great PR man - he publishes his book on a Sunday, creates many events to promote his book etc, and therefore the difference between journalists and PRs is not as defintie as Nick says it is.

As a retort, Nick asks "How vulnerable do journalists have to be to fall for a PR campaign about a book that criticises them?"

Nick Davies:

"Good journalism in this country is not dead. It's just very sick."

"Our press is disappearing into a commercial black hole, and I can't see a solution."

That ended the debate, and the panel turned to answer questions from the audience.

One question raised was whether this book and the events surrounding its publication was a sign of the times that PR has become the story. The answer from Nick was short - No, because part of PR is that it tries to be invisible.

The debate ended with Nick Davies proposing a "Shadow Newsroom", where the media would be forced to publish what percentage of their stories are unreliable in a similar way that food packaging now has to carry nutrional percentages.

For example, the BBC News would go like this:

"Good evening, this is the BBc 6 O' Clock News, where 54% of our stories are unreliable."

It's a great idea and gets a laugh form the audience, but Nick concedes that it would need a lot of money and a government with the courage tio implement it before it would happen.

In a related event that took place at the University of Westminster last week and debated the very same book and ideas, The Guardian journalist Roy Greenslade wrote a follow-up article post titled "Rethinking the Journalsim-PR Divide", Roy Greenslade admitted he was having a change of heart on the debate:

"Ever since last week's debate about the successful grip of PR (see here and here) I've been having revisionist thoughts. I aired them yesterday in my London Evening Standard column yesterday.

I was particularly impressed by a study conducted by Metrica, a media analysis and evaluation company, that showed the growing effectiveness of PR in spite of its practitioners operating within an increasingly fractured media landscape. At first glance, this looks very worrying indeed. At second glance, however, it may be altogether less worrying than we think."

All very interesting, especially when Greenslade recognises of the irony that much of his article was informed from a PR briefing. By the end he was beginning to doubt the extent of the divide between journalists and PR.

Flat Earth News is an interesting book that has given rise to a number of extremely interesting debates. I've got my copy so will be making my decision on the current state of play soon. Perhaps, as Greenslade does, I'll end up thinking we're all in the same boat together. Now all we have to do is to figure out how to stop it sinking.