CBS News Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen blasted the organizational communication/PR profession June 1, 2008 in a scathing piece titled, “The Flak Over Flacks.” If Cohen proved anything with this cynical and mean-spirited diatribe, he proved that he does not know what real organizational communication/PR is.
If you can stand it, read it at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/01/sunday/main4142947.shtml.
Among his ridiculous pronouncements: “Apparently, an industry (PR) the very essence of which is to try to convince people that a turkey is really an eagle has a rule that condemns lying. The Public Relations Society of America states: ‘We adhere to the highest standards of accuracy and truth in advancing the interests of those we represent…’ This clause strikes me as if the Burglars Association of America had as its creed ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal.'”
For the record, Mr. Cohen, the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), the world’s largest truly international communication/PR professional association, has a viable code of ethics, too. Given his ignorance of communication/PR, I would not expect him to know that.
Cohen continues: “Show me a PR person who is ‘accurate’ and ‘truthful,’ and I’ll show you a PR person who is unemployed.” Oh, really!
But wait, folks, Cohen is not finished trashing the PR profession — and organizational communication and PR education: “The reason companies or governments hire oodles of PR people is because PR people are trained to be slickly untruthful or half-truthful. Misinformation and disinformation are the coin of the realm, and it has nothing to do with being a Democrat or a Republican.”
I have news for Mr. Cohen, if he has the mental capacity to absorb it. I worked as an organizational communicator/PR professional and consultant to organizations for over 30 years. Now I have the honor of being a university instructor in PR. I have never in all my years neither as a practitioner nor as a college professor ever instructed anyone to lie, spin, misrepresent, engage in half-truths, or to disseminate dis- or misinformation. To do so first and foremost would violate my personal and professional ethical code, the underpinning of my successful practice throughout my career. Second, in my role as mentor and/or instructor, it would constitute a severe disservice to those I would so instruct. It would be for them a career-limiting move.
So what set Cohen off? Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s book about the Bush administration. But Earth to Cohen: McClellan was a presidential press secretary.
In my opinion, being a U.S. president’s press secretary has little resemblance to the actual jobs of hundreds of thousands of hard-working, honest and ethical, well-educated and prepared practitioners out there engaged in organizational communication/PR.
I am not saying, as Cohen did, that presidential press secretaries or others who practice political media relations, purposely are not ethical or honest. I believe that political press relations is a distinct area of practice that is quite different from organizational communication/PR that Cohen so ignorantly blasted.
I have a strong affection and respect for professionals who practice organizational communication/PR. They build and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with organizations’ key publics. They manage organizational reputations. They simply cannot do this by lying or misrepresenting organizations to publics. It is counter-intuitive.
I have had the honor of working with a host of highly-honorable and professional organizational communication/PR people for over 35 years. I do not know of a single time when a serious and experienced organizational communication/PR professional, me included, chose lying as a strategy. To do so is certain career suicide.
Enter PRSA. The board of directors of PRSA wrote a letter to Cohen which you can read at http://media.prsa.org/article_display.cfm?article_id=1176. I found this letter to be a tepid and incomplete response to the baseless, hurtful, and insulting accusations of Andrew Cohen. I expect better from PRSA, especially a more impassioned explanation and defense of what organizational communication/PR truly is.
IABC understands organizational communication/PR, but I fear that PRSA does not.
Les, your response to Andrew Cohen is powerful. I hope you posted it to the CBS site — if not, please do!
What planet is Andrew Cohen on? Oh, that’s right — the distant galaxy of Washington DC, which is about as far-removed from the real world as one can get.
Not only do I not teach my PR students to lie, spin or speak half-truths, but I spend hours in my classroom teaching them about ethics in our profession and about the various codes of ethics that guide our work.
And my years of professional experience taught me that anything besides the truth and accuracy in my work was not acceptable and would certainly lead to my removal. Was I sometimes asked to keep information under wraps for legitimate reasons? Yes. But asked to lie or to “spin” the truth? Never. And If I had been asked to do so, I would have quit first.
I totally agree wit you on your points. I just did a google search before I publish my own diatribe. However, I disagree on one point. I know that you have an IABC bias, and I will tell you that I have a PRSA bias, being an active member for 14 years; however, at least they DID respond. I am not so sure what more you would expect from them in a letter. That aside, I think that there are two types of camps practicing public relations out there. One is a relationship builder and the other build fantasies. It boils down to training (or lack thereof) and personal ethics. Until we have a more stringent standard, it most likely always will.
Kami,
I don’t know how things unfolded, but I imagine that Andrew Cohen sent PRSA his article, so he could include a quote from the association in his final piece. This might be why PRSA had such a quick response. I am just guessing here.
Tiffany
Right on (and write on), Les! You articulated what I was thinking, although I took a different approach to it with the post to my blog.
As you well know (and Kami does, too), I have the IABC bias. However, I have to give credit to PRSA for addressing Cohen’s rant quickly. I’ve just finished perusing the IABC site, and there’s not a word about it there. We talk a lot about advocacy at IABC, but we never really seem to do very much, do we?
Kami,
Please know that I think you are right: PRSA is due all credit for responding and doing so quickly. PRSA truly acted as advocates for the profession, and I commend the Board for it. IABC did as it usually does when our beloved profession is under attack, sat there doing nothing.
As my dear friend and Fellow IABC zealot Shel Holtz did, I first went to IABC to read the org’s reaction to Cohen’s inanity. Nothing. It is embarrassing.
Kami, thank you for setting me straight. I was remiss in not giving PRSA credit for promptly addressing the issue head on. I did not omit giving credit to PRSA out of any malice toward the org, quite the contrary. I am just growing increasingly critical of both IABC and PRSA over issues such as this.
Kami, you brought me back into balance, and I thank you for that. Please come back to More With Les often and share your wisdom.
Les
This was a no-brainer in terms of our professional associations saying something in defense of our profession (which unfortunately needs all the advocates it can get).
As a member of both associations, I’m disappointed in IABC’s lack of a statement and grateful to PRSA for sticking up for our ethical standards.
Cohen unfortunately has lumped together political apologists with PR professionals everywhere. Just as there are lawyers who are ambulance chasers and those who really make our justice system work, PR practitioners come in all stripes. As a journalist, he should make it his business to do his homework before lambasting an entire profession.
Tiffany; I don’t know the order of how things occurred at PRSA headquarters, but I suspect that Cohen’s piece was actually a reaction to an Advocacy statement issued by PRSA about McClellan’s book (http://tinyurl.com/6xjwya). You see, PRSA has a well-functioning advocacy program. I happen to serve in this capacity at the local chapter level, but I was not personally involved with these recent responses. However, we work in concert to quickly and forcefully respond to ethical concerns about PR. In essence, to get into the news cycle with a vigorous and timely response.
Les; Thanks for conceding that point, but you are right that there is so much more that our professional organizations can do. My goal is to do this from the inside, to continue to support and encourage change. I know that Shel has done much the same.
Les:
To build on Robert Holland’s comment…just as there are some journalists who will write bold faced lies to raise their profile, there are also some PR practitioners who will purposely withhold the truth to lower their employer’s profile. In the political arena, we’ve seen that the numbers for both are higher than in the rest of the real world. While I suspect the former earns a lot more notoriety, the latter hurts our profession in ways that we may never know, making it difficult for the vast majority of PR professionals who have a great story to tell to even get the chance to tell it.
Based on my 25 years in the business, neither accurately reflects the vast majority of their professions.
– Mark
Hi Les, you’ve provided a thoughtful, intelligent post on the Cohen debacle. It’s a shame, CBS Sunday Morning has been my longest-running favorite television show, dating back to a high school English teacher forcing us to watch it as 11th graders. My wife calls the final segment, a “moment of zen.”
Cohen’s disgust with McClellan is fine, but he proved that he knows very little about what communicators do. I have two modes of thinking here. First, while we all know Cohen is full of it, I imagine that most current execs have about the same general feelings about PR. Maybe the name should be dumped? PR has too much baggage at this point…and the stereotype certainly isn’t what most communicators do. This lack of understanding is the biggest challenge the industry faces.
Second, Cohen is reacting to publicity, not public relations. There is a critical distinction here. As I’ve mentioned in the past, PR should be divorced from press agentry/publicity. Those fields are closer aligned to traditional marketing than communications. But, instead, we’re plagued with Intro to PR textbooks that tell us we should trace our heritage to PT Barnum and Bernays.
Oh well, now I’m ranting, when I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your thoughtful reply to Cohen.
Thanks,
Bob
I have read over this posting and its long list of comments several times, trying to decide if I have enough experience or credibility to add my thoughts among such accomplished practitioners.
What has made my mind up to comment is the hope that I can add a fresh perspective, an act Les encouraged again and again in class this past semester.
I, like any other Public Relations professional, was indignant and outraged after reading Mr. Cohen’s column. However, after reading through some of Mr. Cohen’s past work, I am no longer as shocked as I was in the beginning by his generalized taunts at our profession. Judging by the tone of some of his work, I am now merely surprised that the topic of Public Relations professionals wasn’t slashed down sooner.
As a member of the Towson University class of 2008, I am just stepping into this profession and it is opinions like Mr. Cohen’s that are making searching for a job increasingly difficult. I am not as angry at Mr. Cohen anymore as much as I am at people who think like him (a population that grows ever larger).
The sad reality is this: People are constantly looking for a cause, something to believe in. Give them a strong opinion (like Mr. Cohen’s) and they’ll gobble it up, take in on and carry it as their torch until something better comes along. This is how we end up with stereotypes and cynical generalizations by people who really should know better.
Unfortunately, some people who do not belong in our profession add weight to these lemmings’ arguments with scandals beyond measure. From Exxon-Valdez to FEMA, there are very public dishonest missteps that catch the public eye and build distrust and skepticism of what is a very concrete and truthful profession. Google “Past PR Scandals.” It’s disgusting.
Why these opinions hurt my and every other graduate’s job search is they appear to be held by business owners and opinion leaders all across the nation. Because PR is such a distrusted profession, it is often the first to go and last to enter the workplace. Mr. Cohen and people like him make our profession DISPOSABLE by attempting to discredit it at every turn.
What’s a PR professional to do? Here we are, a group unlike any other, with written and oral communication skills beyond measure… how do we fight back? What is our response to Mr. Cohen and bigots like him? Surely, this cannot end with the PRSA’s letter!
What I would like is guidance from the seasoned professionals to which I have so humbly added my thoughts. HOW CAN I HELP? What is it that I can do besides angrily rant in the blogosphere? I resent Mr. Cohen for defacing what I consider to be an honorable profession – what can be done about it?
Could it be that communicators/PR pros are too close to the profession to adequately and objectively define/explain it to the rest of the world?
(It’s just like like ham radio operators attempting to portray our hobby’s relevance to non-hams in the Internet age; we “get it,” but can’t figure out why so few others do.)
If so, then who can/should be the profession’s advocate?
Otherwise, I think Andrew Cohen needs to switch to a decaffinated coffee.
[…] Don’t be mad, be good Posted on June 3, 2008 by Richie On Sunday, June 1, 2008 legal analyst Andrew Cohen of CBS spoke out on former White House Press Secretary, Scott McClellen’s new tell-all book. In his report, “The Flak on Flacks,” Cohen accuses PR professionals of making a living on untruths. He even calls out PRSA’s ethics. National PRSA responded. Cohen responds. And the arguing rages on, and on, and on. […]
Hi Uncle Lester,
I’m shouting you out to the world. Thanks for being on my thesis committee.
Cohen’s comments are unfortunate, but I don’t think they’ll cause as much damage as maybe he’d like. McClellen’s communication tactics and strategies were for the president and not an organization. Like you said Unc, “being a U.S. president’s press secretary has little resemblance to the actual jobs…” It would be great to get Cohen to participate in a public forum or on a public panel with you experts so that he can elaborate a little more on his assessment of PR. He’ll walk away a changed man once you guys finish with him.
Did that PRSA letter really come from the desk of Jeffrey Julin the Chairman & CEO? His sinister response does not represent PRSA well and is quite pathetic and incomplete (as you said). If there is one positive from his letter and your post, it is the binding together off PR professionals who know he is wrong. That tells me that Public Relations field is stronger and we (as a group) are better than he states.
Hi Les,
This is a great response to Cohen. I think this situation shows that PR professionals need to do a better job of educating the public about the purpose of PR and what the profession really entails. The industry needs to do a better job of managing its own PR.
Alisha:
I acknowledged that PRSA at least responded, but your point still stands. I studied MBA programs for my MBA thesis on communication as a strategic management tool, and I was shocked to find that of the 15 top-rated MBA programs, only nine (at that time, 1998) offered any type of communication/PR courses as part of their programs. Almost none treated employee/internal communication. MBA programs ostensibly train future business leaders. My point is that these business leaders will de-value communication/PR if they are not trained to value it along with finance, accounting, marketing, etc.
Les
What the heck??!! I was trying to close a paren in my comment above, and I got a smiley face. I DON”T DO smiley faces. It is supposed to read 1998.
Embarrassed,
Les
Heh. Close-paren after an 8 equals an emoticon, and your blogging software probably has emoticons turned on. There’s a WordPress setting where you can turn them off.
[…] On Sunday, June 1, 2008 legal analyst Andrew Cohen of CBS spoke out on former White House Press Secretary, Scott McClellen’s new tell-all book. In his report, “The Flak on Flacks,” Cohen accuses PR professionals of making a living on untruths. He even calls out PRSA’s ethics. National PRSA responded. Cohen responds. And the arguing raged on, and on, and on. […]