Reporters must be free to report wars, IT, whatever

The PR industry is not normally seen as a friend of the press. Too many PROs are ex journalists who hated the production line mentality, hard grind or the low rates of pay. Too many PROs have never written a news article in anger, let alone seen an angry Sub. Too many PROs see their role as manipulation or even control of journalists in their clients interests. And frankly many journalists are supine, partisan and inept. This makes PR easy and society the poorer.

Manipulating journalists to get a positive write up about your client's new restaurant / book / USB-dongle-widget may seem harmless even if it is (perhaps to the surprise of many in our industry) seen as distasteful by the public control of whose behaviour is the ultimate goal of this anti-media effort. Manipulating journalists as a tool in warfare is most certainly harmful. 

Armies and governments wishing to suppress people by force will, of necessity, prevent journalists from witnessing the acts of their agents. They will manipulate, obfuscate and lie. Democratic states do this too. Right now Israel, a proper democracy, is preventing journalists from witnessing the actions of their troops in Gaza. In doing so they are repeating the intolerable actions of the United Kingdom in the Falklands and, to a degree, the United States of America in recent expeditionary wars. 

Now I have opinions about the actions of the Israeli state, about the actions of Hamas and Fatah, and about the other actors and countries embroiled in the conflict in the middle east. This blog is not the place to air those opinions: it's a blog about PR Strategy. What I can say is that all of the people of Israel and Palestine and indeed the world have a right for independent persons to witness and report to others their experiences, especially in an armed conflict. This is, I believe, a right so fundamental that it should be enshrined in international humanitarian law.

It is not new that those in power should seek to control what is said about them but it is not acceptable in this world today. It must be stopped and there is only one way to stop it.

And that's to stop doing it.

I mean always stop doing it. Don't do it to promote a restaurant. Don't do it to get a puff piece about a whizzo smart-phone. Don't do it to get positive coverage of knife-crime figures. Don't do it. And tell people that journalists, even technology correspondents, even cub reporters on local weeklies, even mid morning chat show hosts on local radio, all journalists are so important that they must always be treated with respect.

Stand up for journalism. You know it makes sense.

Image is Israel and Gaza -6 by Amir Farshad Ebrahimi and is distributed under CC-SA-2.0