PRs shouldn't rush to welcome Leveson

PR professionals need to interrogate the Leveson report in great detail. That's because there's the possibility of another Dangerous Dogs-type Act coming on. In 1991 several high-profile outrages involving fighting dogs biting, maiming and killing babies and old folk were whipped up by the tabloids to create a moral panic. Then emotionally-incontinent parliamentarians rushed through draconian legislation. The result is now acknowledged to have been a disaster for public protection, dogs owners and justice (1).

But the Charted Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) has been precipitously cherry picking bits of Leveson's report to endorse. Take this example:

CIPR statement on the Leveson Report

However, if CIPR had taken a closer look at Leveson (or even reports of his near-2000-page report) they would have noted that he urged the media and PR to ban 'off the record briefings' from the lexicon. The phrase should be replaced, according to Leveson, by the term 'non-reportable briefing'. This is a call for the state (or at best an independent non-statutory regulator with teeth) to police words, opinions and practice. As Dan Hodges noted in The Daily Telegraph, it throws up a host of worries:

The Vichy Evening News, formerly known as The Guardian, has gone bonkers over Leveson

Certainly, CIPR has not thought through the consequences of endorsing this particular recommendation. Are police officers really going to be prevented from saying anything to the media unless a press officer from the PR department is present? What if no press officer is around at a crime scene when the police need to get a message out immediately via the media in the interest of public safety?

As Hodges notes, many mundane practical issues of public and media relations were seemingly beyond Leveson's comprehension:

Leveson says that leaders, ministers and shadow ministers, and their “agents”, should publish “a fair and reasonably complete picture, by way of general estimate only", of “correspondence, phone, text and email” communications with journalists. What’s a general estimate? What’s a reasonably complete picture? Is an aide to some shadow minister who rings me and says “You’re not going to believe what Ed Miliband’s done now” going to have to record that conversation and declare it? Bonkers.

Off the record briefings and the trust that they depend on (including providing the media unmediated access to senior executives) are mission-critical arts in PR-influenced relationships. Are we really prepared to abandon past practice just because a judge makes recommendations about things and relationships he barely understands?

Leveson has failed to grasp that anybody with a Twitter or Facebook account today is a journalist: hence to comply with his logic, PRs would need to be in on every contact with others, public or private, the police and many other officials have. That's not least because, according to Edelman's trust survey, people like us supposedly (though I along with Leveson doubt it) are much more trusted and influential than mainstream media.

Moreover, when CIPR backs Leveson on the grounds that his codes would make PRs accountable, it would seem they haven't thought much about what we'd be accountable for. Is it note-taking and record-keeping? Or is it the veracity of what's said and legal responsibility for its consequences? Are we to become de facto police officers? This is serious stuff worth thinking about before our professional bodies start endorsing Leveson's detailed proposals.

What's more, CIPR might have served the public interest (not mention PR's and the media's) better had it applied some scepticism to exposing Leveson's own lack of frankness with words and definitions - which looks to me like his slippery way of avoiding accountability for them. Leveson claims that statutory underpinning ‘is not, and cannot be characterised as, statutory regulation of the press’. That's spin (as is his oxymoronic formulation "independent self-regulation"), and we should say so.

What Leveson means is that he proposes light-touch statutory regulation designed to make a mostly voluntary self-regulatory system an operational imperative for the media. The fact that he couldn't say so clearly should raise eyebrows.

It's also sad that the PR trade's professional bodies are so keen to puff up our role in society that they cannot see the significance of the fact that PR and journalism are trades, not professions. Our work is not in the same class as that of lawyers and doctors, and cannot be regulated as if it were. Journalism and PR are knacks (not bodies of knowledge) that anybody can acquire or practice . Put another way, you don't need (yet) a licence to open a Twitter or Facebook account or to launch a lobby group or to talk to the media of any sort.

No doubt, there are insights and recommendations in Leveson's report worthy of our support, just as much as there are ones worthy of our scepticism. I'm not backing the status quo or defending bad practice or ethics. But my position hasn't changed much from start to finish of the Leveson inquiry. My views were best put by an editorial in The New York Times entitled Press Freedom at Risk:

Press independence is as essential a bulwark of political liberty in Britain as it is everywhere. That independence should not, and need not, be infringed upon now. Much of the conduct described in the report on Thursday — hacking into voice mail messages of ordinary citizens and illegally obtaining medical records — is not news gathering. They are illegal acts under British law. So are bribery, corrupt relations with police officials and political figures and other abuses attributed to the tabloid press.

That leads me to my main worry. We might end up with either a/ easily discredited and unthought-through so-called independent self-regualtion with unenforcible statutory legislation/underpinnings b/ discredited self-regualtion of trades and practices that are beyond anybody's control.

Yes, these are thorny issues in 'the internet age' (a phrase I normally avoid), and dealing with them requires us to take our time and to stop panicking as we search for the moral high ground.

(1.) The Kennel Club's preference is to scrap all current legislation (even though it's been amended since 1991), And the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals has said the Act never worked: see
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/nov/05/animalwelfare.world and http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/dangerous-dogs-act-has-never-worked-says-rspca-431905.html