ABSTRACT
Media relations has always been the lifeblood of the PR industry. A distance between journalism and public relations is healthy for any liberal democracy. Scepticism of PR is the proper response of a free media. And historically there was a definite tension and frequent conflict between the two groups, which ought to have antithetical professional motivations even though they draw on many skills in common. In recent decades, journalists became complicit with PR, dependent on it for news stories, partly because of the structural conditions under which journalism operates (such as profit-seeking at the expense of independent reporting). The information subsidies provided to journalists by PR – press releases, speeches, interviews with organisational leaders – have caused some control over the news agenda to be ceded to PR. In recent years, journalism shows signs of capitulating to PR’s agenda, with much media content actually being written by PR practitioners rather than journalists. Public trust in the mass media is in decline, a process accelerated by the ‘fake news’ phenomenon.
