IB: Is PR about telling the truth?

JH: Well I think it should be but as I think another PR pioneer, Eddie Bernays, said, that PR is telling the truth persuasively. Of course the more advanced modern media becomes and you realize about editing and selectiveness, of course telling the truth persuasively can be telling the truth selectively and that can also effectively mean skewing the truth. And certainly spin, the modern nemesis of PR's reputation is really about telling the truth in such a selective and skewed way as to render it not truthful at all.

IB: So is spin a variation of what PR does?

JH: I've always called spin an errant cousin of PR. I think at its purest, PR is a very essential part of the information business and its counterpart journalism. I think it clearly, at its absolute best, journalism would regard itself as free from PR by which it means free from anything it hasn't discovered for itself and made up its own mind about. But it doesn't mean to say that getting info through a different channel and being at the behest of somebody for that information naturally means that info is corrupt. And so what you have it seems to me is something of a stand-off between PR and journalists where the bad behaviour in some sections of PR, in particular political PR, has become a skewed reputation of the entire industry and at the same time journalism's, dare I say it, failings, which is to be much more at the mercy of the market and therefore much less able to spend time in investing and finding out the truth, unfettered and unaided by anything else. Journalism tends to blame the messenger where it probably ought to look more to its own self.

IB: When the bottom line of PR is that you have to serve the interests of your client, then a lot of people would argue that you can't really talk about the pursuit of truth when it comes to PR.

JH: Well I actually don't see why not. I think, for a start, that presumes that there's something wrong with the clients that are going to be represented and I think in some cases clearly you could, you could find yourself having to argue something that you don't support and I think that's the time to resign. So I'm not defending telling anybody's truth as long as they'll pay you the most money—what's called the taxi rank principle that you, anybody can cue up and get PR representation. But I also think it's worth emphasizing that journalism also has its paymaster. It's extremely rare for journalism not to have an actual expectation of bias in some quarters or an institutional bias. Now I don't mean that is to say that all journalism is coloured but what I do mean is that editorials and comment pieces are bias and that they're absolutely standard in many newspapers and broadcasters, that a certain kind of coverage will be given to one thing and not another. So I think we have to be, at the very least, philosophical and at the very, quite apart from anything else, getting a bit more real about the actual differences between the moral parameters of PR and the moral parameters of journalism.

IB: Are you also suggesting that reporters also have biases in the way they cover stories?

JH: Well I think in some cases you've had a diminishing of the powers of the reporters and that what's happened is that the editorial bias gets superimposed in the way, that is, that the headline is written and the way a piece is edited and there are certain newspapers in the UK that are heavily criticized for writing pieces that are basically a foregone conclusion, so I certainly think that what is called spin in PR can be called agenda journalism. Yes, I do.

IB: So tell me what the difference is between a PR truth and a journalistic truth.

JH: Well, that's a very good question. I'm not sure there's a difference per se between a PR truth and a journalistic truth. I think that in some cases, it's simply about how obfuscated the truth is. If, as in the case of Enron, the truth is buried amongst a welter of facts and information and the journalistic community became, dare I say, complacent and lulled about the truth that was really in those figures, then the misdemeanor is on both sides of PR and journalism. Sometimes you get an agenda journalism, that no matter what the truth is and how it's told, it's actually going to be spun by the journalists—whether that's how it's edited, whether that's how it's put in context, whether that's the way it's illustrated with a photograph or whatever. But in PR that undermining of the truth is very transparent when it's spin and when you are—PR is often accused of controlling access to the detriment of those that want to find out the truth. In other words, no, you can't have more than 2 minutes with the CEO because if you do, you're going to ask a difficult or a dangerous question. And I'm equally against self-deception. I think we are in many quite seminal ages in information. I think the media academic, Steven Bonnet, said we're in the age of contempt, particularly in broadcasting and particularly in the UK. Which is obviously the media market I know most about. But I also think—and by contempt I mean, the way in which a disgust almost for public figures can be shown by interviewers. Equally, I think we're in the age of transparency. Reality TV has shown that everything is pretty naked and on view. But I think in terms of information, we are also, arguably, in the age of denial. Everybody tells their own truth and denies that it's not the truth. Everybody says the non-denial denial constitutes the truth. So, "Read my lips, no new taxes," is something to do with the age of denial. When a politician—a great one for being in denial. But I think traditionally, the PR industry has denied when it's used spin and that's been to its detriment so I'm for transparency and truth but for a more complex view of the truth than just simple: it's two legs good, four legs bad.

IB: What do you think are journalism's inherent conflicts of interest?

JH: I'm not sure I mean to say that the journalism conflict of interest is greater than that in PR. I think I was answering your question about the pay-master point and all I'm saying is that pay-masters visible and invisible still extol the same influence. I think that journalism's main bias is that it's a deeply competitive industry and if a journ knows that the expectation is to turn up something that is going to sell more than if they tell the truth which may be less glamorous, their career may be on the line. And that's a simplified snapshot of the situation but it's a pretty important factor in the economics of journalism and also how it plays out in terms of how the truth is told.

IB: Why do you think it's always been so hard for journalists to accept the role that PR plays in their world?

JH: Well, because I think that in terms of economics, the muckrakers came first and then they, some of them left and went into PR and there's been a healthy competition historically between those in journalism and those in PR. They're not the same thing, I'm not saying they are. And clearly there's a divergence on some crucial points. For instance, I may have enjoyed my time doing PR, you know, very good contacts with a particular journalists. I never thought for one minute that they wouldn't do their job if presented with anything I'd said or done that meant they wanted to pursue me in a negative way. That is the fundamental right of journalists to pursue a story. My observation, having worked in PR for about 20 years, is that PR is the hand that feeds journalism much more than journalism would care to admit. And I think it's this dependence on PR that has spawned this great resentment. I think that journalists forget that most people in PR respect the line, they know that if you want to control a message absolutely, you take out advertising, you don't do PR. PR is about telling the truth persuasively, it's about advocacy, it's about putting your view across and having it selected by the journalist. Journalism's myth is that somehow, it's all about uncovering and revealing and somehow being part detective, part storyteller, and I think PR has a lot more realpolitik to it.

IB: People in your book have suggested you're more likely to get the truth these days from a corporate PR person than a journalist. That really seems to be waving the red flag.

JH: I know, I think there' s a lot in this debate that does appear to wave the red flag to journalists and I can only say I think that good, free and independent journalism must be championed. It's absolutely the cornerstone of anything democratic. However, a lot of what masquerades as good, free, independent journalism can also be revealed to have interests and agendas and where you talk about corporate PR, that example is because of legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley; you just have a forced, regulated transparency in certain sections which don't exist in the media. The media can, in many respects, certainly in the print media, pretty much say what it likes with a fair degree of impunity, and is much less self-regulated than perhaps it could be. Whereas, actually in PR, you simply can't go around saying things that are untrue without massively heavy fines, especially with the financial markets. So there is in fact a discrepancy and the upper hand for being inaccurate with impunity lies with journalism and not with PR.

IB: You've been on a crusade to improve the relationship between journalism and PR. Why?

JH: Well, I think I'm just doing it from personal motivations really, which I was always sort of surprised and bemused by the fact that when I told people I was in PR 20 years ago, and they were journalists, they would take it as a given that I was morally inferior to them; they would pretty much say, "Okay, we like you and we'll do business with you but really, you're lower down the food chain than we are." And I just thought come on, this is a bit mad really and then in the last few years, we've had very notable crises of journalism in terms of the NY Times scandal, in several instances but mostly with Jason Blair, the reporter who admitted to making up his stories and not filing from the cities he was supposed to file from and so on and then we had Judith Miller who was accused by a columnist from her own newspaper of being less of a reporter and more of a stenographer for the WH. So suddenly it occurred to me that whilst journalism was clearly going through a fair degree of crisis, it was still almost clinging onto the belief that it was okay to blame PR for the moral drift if you like and of course this coincided with lots and lots of examples of spin and going to war over Iraq, as is always the case with war, a very good case study of propaganda and how it's used. And it just struck me as being the moment to really say, hang on a second, what is the relationship between two of the absolute pillars of both democracy and of efforts to undermine it, which is, in an information society, in a technology society, information comes through journalism and journalism's larger source, I would argue, is PR, without a shadow of a doubt. News that happens uncontrolled by PR is a fraction of news that is relayed out through links of some kind, hooks, anniversaries, a moment to cover something in a particular way. So to deny the collusion, to deny the inter-dependency, the complexity, to deny the fascination of these two businesses, seems not appropriate at the beginning of the 21st century.

IB: You've talked about need for more transparency and in your book you talk about "inside out info." Can you explain to me what that means.

JH: Well, I think that if you look at cultural history, that there has been a shift from everything being hidden to everything being on display. You might take an example of the Brit Royal Family or examples of just the entertainment industry itself. I've talked before about reality TV and if you look at architecture, take a building like the Pompadou Centre in Paris, the guts and plumbing of that building, which was built in the 70s, was a marked departure culturally that suddenly you had the workings of something as fundamental as a building on display. And I don't know whether it's too far fetched as a comparison but I think the way that information is now on display is quite similar and that we should, those of us in information business, as I say in PR and journalism, both should really embrace that trend. I'm really in favour of exploring an internet version of content labeling—content labeling in food is now passé but ten years ago it was seen as being rather outre this idea that everything you ate you knew not just the E-numbers but the fat content and so on. Now, in the last 2 or 3 years, there's been a complete acceleration of literacy about food contents and suddenly the consumer demand is that you have to know every single fraction of what you're eating and whether it's organic and whether it's this, that and the other. And I don't see why we can't have that sort of transparency when it comes to information so, for instance, if a journalist writes a story, why can't there be some back channel on the internet that says, "This story used five on the record sources, 3 unattributable, it relied on 2 pieces of information that have been contested for their voracity," whatever. You want to build up a picture for the audience of how that info came to be stacked together to create that story and it seems to me that there are many, many problems with this theory—I'm not saying it's ready to roll of the production line. But I do think it illustrates that we don't have anything like the transparency, how many PR briefings were used in a particular story. In fact, whether there's ever even a social connection between the people in PR and the journalists writing the story—maybe it should be recorded: have they had lunch together? Why not. I know that lots of that seems far-fetched and unrealistic but even asking the question seems to be controversial and that seems to me, madness, we ought to be much more advanced in our thinking.

IB: What do you see as the future of both PR and journalism in the age of the internet and blogs?

JH: I think that in terms of journalism, the trusted brand is going to become much more valid than before. What blogging is showing is that there's a fascinating new dimension to information; that information is always on. I think that Marshall McLuhan could never have predicted the age of the blog, he could barely have predicted the age of the internet, but he didn't predict the age of the blog. So the trusted media brands that allow the public to migrate to them in times of public crisis, in times of serious dilemma, is going to be strong but perhaps people are not going to take their primary source from TV, newspaper or radio, before they take it from the internet. I think in terms of PR, the age of the little black book is not completely dead but the age of having to rely on much more strategic, targeted, stakeholder work is much more upon us. The age of taking someone out for a long lunch and sorting the headline is, quite rightly, long gone.

IB: I suppose the internet provides lots of opportunities for content labeling to happen.

JH: I think the signposting on the internet has got to continue to be embraced by people in the information business. I certainly think people in PR need to embrace it and really regard themselves as much as possible as custodians of a particular kind of information that they've been given and as every bit as much committed to truth as their counterparts in journalism who, on the whole, given a chance, are committed to the truth.

IB: So you've never felt like you were part of the dark side?

JH: No, never for a second.

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