Where the Truth Lies

Julia Hobsbawm

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781782397335
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

The relationship between the serious news media and the truth is under scrutiny as never before. In recent years the BBC and the New York Times have been knocked sideways by scandals alleging exaggeration and distortion. At the same time, the influence of the PR industry continues to expand, so that no organisation that is serious about communicating its message can be without a PR strategy.

In a series of wide-ranging essays about public relations and journalism, Where the Truth Lies tackles head-on issues as diverse as the public role of PR, the reportage of crises and the role of 'new' media. It also includes Julia Hobsbawm's four point plan to remake the relationship between PR and journalism. Contributors include John Lloyd, Simon Jenkins, Peter Oborne, Mark Borkowski and Janine di Giovanni.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Julia Hobsbawm • Introduction

Emily Bell • Fact-Mongering Online

Sarah Benton • A Make-Believe World

Mark Borkowski • Is Honesty the Best Policy?

Colin Byrne • Living in Spin

Michael Cockerell • News from Number Ten

Leonard Doyle • Poached Gamekeeper

Kim Fletcher • Sympathy for the Devil

Nick Fraser • Wolfowitz’s Comb: Trouble in the Information Society

Janine di Giovanni • Writing from Israel

Anne Gregory • The Truth and the Whole Truth?

Julian Henry • Where the Truth Lies in Entertainment PR

Simon Jenkins • PR and the Press: Two Big Guns

John Lloyd • ‘Consider Not the Beam, Focus on the Mote’

Deborah Mattinson • Trust

Baroness Julia Neuberger • Where the Truth Lies, There Lie I

Robert Phillips • Citizen Truths and Civic Principles: The Reformation of Public Relations

Peter Oborne • Servants of the Truth

Anya Schiffrin • PR in Developing Countries

Jean Seaton • Nano-Truths and the Story

Alice Sherwood • A Place Called Hope: On Inauthentic PR

Andrew St George • Crises and Their Discontents

Simon Walker • A Long Way from Watergate

Derek Wyatt • The New Media and Trust

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank all the contributors for being so very generous with their thoughts. This is a rich collection of ideas as a direct result of them. I have also consulted a number of invaluable sounding boards for this book, and especially want to thank Charlie Burgess; Jessica Morris; Robert Phillips; Nina Planck, Sophie Radice; Alex Sandberg; and Saskia Sissons. For this second edition, I updated my Introduction in the company of my father Eric. His observations, coming as they did from an old pro on the eve of his ninety-third birthday, were as sharp as ever.

My children always tell me the truth, even if it is that I have stayed at the computer way too long for their liking. My husband Alaric always gives sage advice that I trust. Toby Mundy and his team at Atlantic are, as ever, terrific.

Finally, this book is dedicated to those who are as interested in moral philosophy as they are in technology in relation to media and all of its intersecting parts, notably public relations and journalism.

London July 2010.

WHERE THE
TRUTH LIES

Introduction

Julia Hobsbawm

Truth matters. The Independent reveals the truth behind the news, without fear or favour … the truth can sometimes get lost.

Independent ‘Truth’ campaign to mark the general election and its new ownership, April 2010

Trust and transparency are as important to corporate reputation as the quality of products and services.

Edelman Trust Barometer, January 2010

When this collection of essays was first published, back in 2006, an age before the dominance of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, public relations and journalism only really had to worry about each other. Journalism’s scorn for public relations was ill disguised and matched only by its dependency on it for stories. By the early part of this century all public relations, whether it was providing strategic counsel for oil-spilling multinationals or media relations for bird sanctuaries was commonly dismissed by one word: spin.

This antipathy, voiced initially in the first edition, reached a tipping point later in 2008 when Nick Davies’s book Flat Earth News was published. It explored in detail how journalism’s economic model meant that receiving pre-packaged information was critical to its survival. Flat Earth News coined the immortal phrase ‘churnalism’ to describe the increasing indivisibility between manufactured news and real reporting.

But already PR and journalism had a new, joint worry: not each other, with their inseparability finally made public, but the general public, who were straying from their joint reach.

The public, who are informed/entertained/sold to, had economic power but they were largely as dependent as babies on the kind of information they received. So we – the journalists, the PR people, the communicators – fed them. How their hunger was sated was in our control and we used it. Public power via the media was in its infancy: no answering back.

As the first decade of the new century closed the ‘citizen journalist’ was born, a grown-up reader, viewer, listener, with the power to make and shape the news and views landscape directly, unmediated by the vested interests of media ‘parents’.

How fast children grow. The business of media and communication and its principal players of journalists and PR advocates have had to come to terms with a new reality in which what they each say is true can be challenged or even superseded by others very fast indeed.

The old adage about a week being a long time in politics is now hyper-true. In the news media the veracity of content is dominated by the speed at which the content is created and put out to the public, with perceptions forming, changing and reforming in a matter of hours, minutes and even seconds.

And where speed is important, dimension is too. Response and rebuttal, which used to take place behind closed doors, are now an integral part of the media. The TV phone-ins of yester-year have become entire entertainment schedules dominated by programmes involving text and telephone voting; newspapers have online comments stretching quickly into hundreds and in some cases thousands of responses. The public has become a producer of message, and a promoter of it, not just a consumer.

Pretty much everyone can have media access now (Facebook’s rise to half a billion members in six years owes its success in large part to falling hardware prices that have removed the barrier for internet models which faced radio and television in their infancy.) The shockwaves for corporate society and its media networks alike are huge.

When this book first came out, TV news was the fastest way to communicate to mass audiences. Newspapers did not have online editions, with the exception of www.guardian.co.uk. No one knew what a ‘trending topic’ on Twitter meant. Mobile communications meant phone calls, not permanent links to the internet and social networks. Media channels haven’t just proliferated, they have accelerated.

According to Twitter’s own blog: ‘Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day – that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.’

But how much of the tsunami of information that goes out on Twitter is true? There is no editing, no time to edit. Re-tweeting – passing on wholesale what others have tweeted – is widespread. So is putting up links of interesting clips, articles, thoughts, with no means to verify them before they’ve gone. Information truly is viral now. Instead of the ‘rolling news’ culture of 24/7 which marked the first edition of this book, we are now firmly in a 24-nanosecond culture.

Editors check articles before publication for punctuation, accuracy, tone and balance, conscious always of the public interest. And if they also drive fellow journalists to great feats of hyperbole, it is on the basis that if the public is interested, it’s in the public interest.

Peter McKay, British Journalism Review, 2005

In this new era truth and trust have become highly valued commodities. They are almost traded as such: prove you are more trustworthy than your opponents or competitors, and your stock will rise, either literally or by brand and reputational value.

Yet it is hard to tell these days exactly where the truth lies. Rumour and urban myth, dumbed-down falsehoods and leaked spin all thrive in today’s expanding, instantaneous, downloaded media world. The public are quick to punish when they feel misled or lied to. Increasingly they mind about the gap between truth and reality: perception.

Great feats of hyperbole often happen in an attempt to hold attention or drive opinion one way or another. News blurs with opinion and the heavy edit known as ‘context’ can transform perceptions of what is true at all: give too little attention to something and a truth may never be told; give too much, out of context, and it is magnified to the point of distortion.

There is no such thing as absolute truth in the media; there are only versions of it. A story is endlessly regurgitated and updated, on air, online and of course in print. They used to say of bad publicity: ‘Oh, don’t worry, today’s news wraps tomorrow’s fish and chips’, but today’s words live online, literally for ever.

Although hyperbole is also associated with the more trivial end of media and PR, the celebrity kiss-and-tell ‘stories’ pro-moted by agents to the highest media bidder, anxiety about hype is reaching into more serious areas around public policy and those charged with moving great mountains of public opinion are finding out that to stray by accident or design into hype can backfire horribly, such is the appetite to be told ‘clean’ stories.

The dossier used by the British government under Tony Blair to justify the invasion of Iraq is an obvious example. As the ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ which could reach our shores in ‘forty-five minutes’ failed to materialize, the Government was accused, by the BBC and its flagship morning current affairs radio programme the Today programme no less, of ‘sexing up’ the dossier and, with it, the case for war.

In a domino-effect of PR disaster and public disbelief, the resulting furore led directly to the resignations of the Chairman of the BBC, Gavyn Davies, and its Director General, Greg Dyke, the resignation of former Downing Street Communications Chief Alastair Campbell, and eventually of the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, himself.

This episode drew the public into a direct debate about where the truth lies. The reputations of both the Government and the BBC became hugely tarnished. The BBC even had to restate its basic journalism values by retraining its own journalists.

Similarly the reputation of the climate change campaigners, enjoying a huge success in mobilizing global action and attention around carbon emissions, faced a sudden crisis of confidence in 2009 when the so-called ‘climate change deniers’ scored a number of PR hits against the movement by producing evidence of some allegedly doctored academic information from no less an authoritative source than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Truth is at the heart of the debate about climate change, as it was about WMD. It was former US Vice President Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth which ‘has been credited with raising international public awareness of climate change and reenergizing the environmental movement’ according to Wikipedia.

By mid 2009, climate change had become a defining, central and fashionable issue with virtually no dissenting voices.

But in this speeded-up world counter-claim soon thrives. The apparently unassailable coalition of scientists and media-friendly green companies and political champions was ambushed by the charge of hyperbole over how bad the problem really is.

The charge of hype blew a hole in public confidence larger than the one in the ozone layer, and focusing the public’s minds on the issue once again remains one of the defining communications challenges.

In satire truthiness is a ‘truth; that a p...