By all accounts — well, according to the two people I’ve spoken to, which is more checking than apparently anyone has a right to expect these days — the debate at Westminster University in April entitled “The growth of PR is threatening the integrity of the press” was a bit one-sided. Lord Tim Bell, famous for being Margaret Thatcher’s PR man, and Phil Hall, a former editor of the News of the Worldwho now runs his own PR firm, put across a charming and informed defence of their profession. Media commentator Roy Greenslade and Nick Davies, of The Guardian, arguing for the motion, came over as a bit whiney. The PR men won the debate by a considerable margin, 164-59.

Those two senior and distinguished journalists seemed to be rather resentful of the notion that PR people would put a spin favouring their clients on any news story they give to the media (or so my sources tell me. I couldn’t be there due to a client crisis). Eh? Why wouldn’t we? And if we didn’t, who do journalists think would pay for their lunches? Not their proprietors, that’s for sure. The cutbacks on expense accounts and other resources have been savage over the past decade, as we all know. In my last job in journalism I started out spending around £250 a week on entertaining, which I believed was exceptionally restrained for a diarist. That was axed and axed until it came down to less than £100 a week, pretty much ruling out lunch or dinner on me. I was reliant for food and drink on the PR industry and jolly grateful, too.

There is an old school of journalistic thought, as conceited as it is quaint, that PR people should be information officers whose primary function is to make life easier for hacks. The same school of thought holds that modern PR people are slick, scientific spinners who cynically exploit the media, particularly when it is weakened, such as now, by scarce resources. The truth is probably about halfway between the two. Of course we PRs want to put our clients’ points of view. That’s no different to wearing your most flattering outfit for an important meeting. It isn’t venal or even especially commercial. Putting your best foot forward is an entirely natural and quite uplifting thing to do.

The only truly unprincipled PR practices I am aware of are in politics. In his excellent book, The Rise of Political Lying, Peter Oborne laid bare the New Labour government’s cynical manipulation of public perceptions by its policy of rewriting what it called the “narrative truth”. If you just say something often enough, eventually it will gain credence and take hold. The idea was borrowed from the White House, where one un-named adviser is quoted explaining why “reality-based” perceptions are irrelevant: “That’s not the way the world works any more. We’re an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that new reality – judiciously as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities.” I don’t know of anyone in the corporate PR world who’s that cynical.

The lure of money

But where’s the fun in having to produce so much copy that you don’t have the time or budget to meet your contacts? Or in being scared to ask for a pay rise? Or, for the high-minded, in not being allowed to devote sufficient resources to get your story right? Or living with the knowledge that your bosses pretty much despise you? Trevor Morris, visiting professor of public relations at Westminster University, is, as I write, putting together a paper in which he’ll argue that PR people tend to be upbeat, optimistic, gregarious types who like to be liked, while hacks have a tendency to be gloomy, cynical conspiracy-theorists and loners.

I think he’s largely right, but was it always that way? I wonder whether those types now drift towards those PR jobs, or whether they become upbeat, gregarious etc because of the nature of the jobs. Certainly, my lifestyle and work in public relations is far more enjoyable than my last job in journalism, which became a bit of a battle not only over expenses but also time spent at my desk and words produced. In PR, these things are not issues. Results are the only measure of success and if you get good ones then no one gives a damn about how many hours you spend in the office.

So during school holidays I can work just as effectively, using my mobile phone and mobile email device, from Spain or France or, recently, Canada as I can sitting in my London office. And I can spend all week at the Cheltenham Gold Cup Festival enjoying myself instead of scratching around for five or six spurious racing-related diary stories every day. And there’s no one (except, occasionally, my wife) tapping his or her watch censoriously if I fail to return to my desk after lunch. It’s a bit like being a journalist used to be. And as the average calibre of journalist is continually lowered by the intake of barelyadult internet surfers, the usefulness of PR people will continue to rise and rise.

There was an occasion at The Daily Telegraph in the mid-1990s when the fearsome property correspondent, Bruce Kinloch, made a rare appearance in the office at lunchtime. He found one young reporter glued to his screen, copy-tasting the wire services. “I never got any stories by sitting around in the office,” said Kinloch, reprovingly. The youngster responded: “I think you’ll find that your ways are gone forever.” I was pretty shocked at that, but the young man was right. He went on to become a business editor and the old ways went out of the window.

One can perhaps understand the frustration of Davies and Greenslade at journalists being beholden to PR people, but what if we didn’t exist? Where would the stories come from in this terrible era of journalistic cost-cutting? And if we expect the courtesy of not being turned over by the person we’ve given the story to, how is that different from the expectations of a politician or a policeman or anyone else who gives stories to the media?

In the late 1980s I presented a couple of Hard News TV programmes about what I saw as the excessively cosy relationship between some financial journalists and PR people, but retrospectively I think I was probably being a bit puritanical. As Alex Murray, then City editor of The Sunday Telegraph, said at the time, PR people are sources just like anyone else and to discriminate against them simply for being PR people would be illogical. That’s where I take issue with Davies and Greenslade and anyone else who thinks that public relations is an insidious influence on the media. The insidious influence is the current orthodoxy that cutting costs is the best way to make the media profitable, because that is what has made journalists beholden to PR people as never before. That’s hardly our fault, is it? And, incidentally, it’s not as if we are just handing out stories that are snapped up without question. I wish it were that easy.

Liars lose credibility

In the years I have spent as a PR man I can only recall only one instance in which I deliberately misled journalists. I was the PR adviser on a big, hostile takeover project that had to be kept under wraps because we believed that if it leaked the deal would die on its feet. There was a lot of speculation about what we were planning and a couple of enterprising journalists dug out the truth – but they were not confident about it, so I steered them in a different direction. Hundreds of millions of pounds were at stake and I felt there was no choice. In the end, the details did leak, the target was alerted and the deal died, so my decision to mislead had been justified (even if, in the final analysis, it had been pointless). I do not regard that as an abuse. Sometimes, as all good journalists know, there are good reasons for keeping secrets.

Not that there aren’t abuses, but they usually require a willing journalist. I have heard of – though never encountered – hacks demanding inducements to follow a particular line. That shocks me, although the whole issue of bribes is a grey area. An epic lunch or dinner in return for a bit of help seems all right to me. The passing of cash in return for a favourable mention doesn’t, though I don’t see anything very wrong, for instance, in paying journalists to attend a dreary press conference that would otherwise be full of empty chairs. That may sound a little dodgy, but surely problems arise only if the journalists are expected to write something, too.

I remember one case where a leading journalist was in need of a great deal of research but could not persuade his newspaper to pay for it. So he phoned a friend who ran a big PR firm (which had nothing to do with the story he was working on) and demanded that they lend him a couple of young executives to work as his researchers. The PR firm didn’t mind much because it was putting a deposit in the favour bank. The story didn’t suffer because the PR firm had no axe to grind. Some would worry that the journalist was indebted to the PR firm, but it’s hardly a Faustian pact, is it? Similarly, as a hack I used to have the secretary of one PR boss fill in my expenses claims because it was a task I loathed. I don’t remember feeling compromised.

Journalists who’ve used up their expense budgets and spent all their own meagre wages but need to entertain an important contact get in touch with me from time to time. Would I mind joining in and picking up the tab to save the hack’s embarrassment? Of course not. All part of the service. Do I want anything in return? Maybe, but nothing earth shattering. A little mention here, a non-mention there. Is that unethical? In the modern world, I don’t think so.