A Publicist Shaming
Why my newspaper now promptly sends communications from PR people to spam
BY CHRIS FARAONE
It took me less than two days as the operating publisher of my newspaper to realize that publicists — way more than reader apathy, and the death of classified ads, and even the internet — have screwed the media beyond oblivion, to the point where I felt no choice but to write this. I suspect my short but pointed missive will upset some people, and may even result in a fractured friendship or two. Certainly the publicists who help me push my books and assorted personal projects will call me a hypocrite and an asshole, and they will be correct. But my existence as a journalist depends on murdering the PR noise machine to the best of my ability, so here goes …
I hope it doesn’t seem too condescending for me to start by explaining what a media relations (or press relations, or PR, they’re more or less interchangeable) person does. Because in my five or so years of teaching media literacy and communications in various settings, from random meetups to more formal college classrooms, I have found that most people don’t really get it. Basically, PR reps are hired propagandists for whoever’s paying, from corporations, to politicians, to the spouses of professional athletes, many of whom literally buy their way into your glamor mags and onto television. If you’ve ever wondered how some mediocre person or another wound up giving advice that they aren’t qualified to deliver, or got put on a list of best something or another despite their obvious shortcomings, ten times out of ten they hired a publicist.
This is a particularly important topic as we squirm and whine about “fake news.” Because in many ways, almost all of the news that we get is fake. Especially information about products and celebrities, not to mention entertainment, restaurants, and nightlife. Reporters who cover those beats — and even those of us who don’t — are inundated with hundreds of press releases a week, suggesting what is hot and sexy at the moment. Whereas journalists were once expected to be tastemakers, these days they are often just the final cog in crass campaigns. Think about the privilege; while the struggling neighborhood joint with incredible grub waits for a critic to discover them, the investor-backed restaurant group pays a marketing wiz. Said wiz simply contacts producers and editors, and bam — instant interest across multiple publications. The same routine explains why local independent bands and grassroots social movements get ignored while bullshit like a Big Mac ATM machine, which I received no less than three press releases about earlier this month, gets covered by almost every outlet in town, to use Boston as an example.
As the story often goes, this hoodwink isn’t new. Nor is the criticism. Ever since ancient PR reps were carving unimaginative misspelled hieroglyphics to boost off-season pyramid tourism in Egypt, scrupulous observers have cried foul. My personal favorite is the historian Daniel Boorstin, whose 1962 book The Image, in which the author derides and exposes a culture of “pseudo-events,” led me to rethink early aspirations to go into advertising. As the great Neal Gabler wrote in a 2012 LA Times piece on Boorstin:
The pseudo-event was a “happening” that was not spontaneous but that was designed precisely to be reported or reproduced. A news conference, a photo-op, a movie premiere, an award ceremony, even a presidential debate — all these are staged, in his analysis, simply to get media attention or, in postmodernist terms, to get attention for attention’s sake. They have no intrinsic value or at least not the intrinsic value they purport to have.
Of course I knew all of this from the decade that I spent as a political reporter, and from the years that I have been an editor. One of my enduring pet peeves is the fact that almost every politician in America, from the state level on up, has taxpayer-funded media relations people who — get this, really, let it sink in — spend their days looking out for the interests of pols, not the public, and obfuscating truths or even lying. But since taking over on the business side of my newspaper, I have begun to loathe the PR establishment in a way that I never could have imagined. Because as I comb through the historical sales reports, I can’t help but realize just how many of our former advertisers now blow their entire marketing budgets on publicists. The same fucking publicists who then come to us for coverage. Imagine that! The goddamn nerve.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but none of this necessarily means that all flacks and publicists are bad or evil people. They may occasionally rep horrible things, like vending machine hamburgers that kill you, but I’m sure that many of them are just trying to pay rent, or loans from colleges that sadly didn’t teach them how to spell or write well. In any case, unless they represent a nonprofit or movement or cause that speaks for oppressed people, from now on I’ll be sending all their press releases to the spam filter, where they rightfully belong. Oh, your client’s restaurant just won some international award? Fuck you, buy an ad. Did you say the national musician who employs you has a show coming up in Boston? Fuck you, buy an ad. In fact, buy two ads. I may sound like a prick, but the future of journalism depends on it.
Chris Faraone is the editor of DigBoston and the co-founder of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
