PR propaganda

When you have a PR peddler questioning your ethics, you know you've gone too far.

Here's my original post on the matter. (Quick catch-up: The U.S. military has paid a D.C. firm to pay for and plant pro-American stories in Iraqi news outlets and I find that pretty dern low.)

From PR maverick Richard Edelman's blog:

This is utterly unacceptable behavior. In no way does this describe public relations. It is pay for play and a PR firm based in the US is doing it. Advertising and public relations are not the same thing. We don't do storyboards. We don't buy space. We don't pay journalists to be on our side. We don't fake out media by pretending that we don't know much about our client, working under cover of night. We don't say that there is only one side to a story. If a free media is a central aspect of a democratic society, then we cannot allow our PR industry to impede its development. It is a perversion of our business, an intentional blurring of a clear demarcation between paid and earned media. We should advise our clients, private sector and governmental, that trust is earned through transparency, continuous communication and dialogue.

No offense to public relations people, of course, but let's be candid -- PR is the business of spin. Most of it is certainly not evil, but when it's perverted and used like this, it gets pretty close.