The MoPR Blog

The PR profession is buzzing this morning. My colleagues and peers are worked up by something they saw on CBS Sunday Morning and read on the program’s website. I’m worked up too.

Here’s an excerpt from what CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen had to say:

“Show me a PR person who is ‘accurate’ and ‘truthful,’ and I’ll show you a PR person who is unemployed.”

The irony of an attorney making a blanket statement about another profession is in and of itself comical. That this attorney works for a news organization infamous for its own casual handling of “facts” and “truth” transforms the statement from merely ironic to absurd.

To illustrate how ludicrous it is for an attorney to cast blanket aspersions on all practitioners of another profession, I tried an experiment which you can do yourself at home. Google “all lawyers are” (be sure to use the quotes). Here are a few choice examples from among the some 57,000 results returned – and I only scanned through the first 30 results:

• …all lawyers are basically immoral
• …all lawyers are crooks
• …all lawyers are a- -holes
• …all lawyers are d- - - - -bags
• …all lawyers are evil
• …all lawyers are dishonest

I for one don’t agree with any of the characterizations above. For example, the corporate attorney for Mobility PR, Matt Lowe of O’Donnell and Clark, is one of the most honest, moral and ethical people I know. The last corporate counsel I worked with, Bruce Posey at iPass, raises ethical business practice to a new bar.

But here’s a news flash for CBS and Cohen, the vast majority of public relations “flacks” (as Mr. Cohen calls us) are likewise honest, moral and ethical. In our agency and at agencies large and small throughout the U.S., we counsel clients to tell the truth, urge transparency in online communications and to address problems head-on, “warts and all.” Show of hands across the PR profession of those of us who had such a conversation on these subjects with their clients in the last week? I was in two myself.

Imagine the fall-out from a situation where a company knowingly lied about a product or service and then was caught doing so. First, sue-happy ambulance chasers would no doubt take legal action. The company’s public perception would be substantially damaged, perhaps irrevocably. The hard-earned relationships forged with those in the media would be severed and the PR flack who suggested that strategy would probably be fired. Mr. Cohen, the PR persons who are “inaccurate” and “untruthful” are the ones who are unemployed.

Mr. Cohen, I don’t know you, but when I review the above list of adjectives I found for attorneys, I’m reasonably sure you aren’t immoral, a crook, evil nor dishonest. But I’m going to leave it at that.

Tags: CBS, ethics, PR, Public Relations

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Mobility Public Relations, Public Relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.