Shownotes:

In the past couple of years, there have been a lot of discussions, debates, articles around how PR practitioners can combat misinformation. It is often cited as one of the bigger challenges along with AI (advanced technology) facing the PR industry.

The Elephant in the Room is the role of PR professionals in the dissemination and amplification of misinformation and fake news. How complicit are we as an industry when propagating the agenda of businesses, individuals, and governments?

Beyond the industry a lot of people ascribe ‘spin’ a pejorative term to the work being done by professionals. So, what’s the truth? To discuss this and more I spoke with Prof Lee Edwards, from the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE. Considering that the title of her 2020 research paper was, ‘Organised lying and professional legitimacy: public relations’ accountability in the disinformation debate’, she has an in-depth understanding of the subject.

In this episode of The Elephant in the Room, we spoke about role of PR in society; the misinformation debate; disposable diversity; ethics of climate communications, AI, ethics in general, and more……..

Thank you Stephen Waddington for the introductions, this fine conversation would not have been possible without your initiative.

Interested in learning more, head to the podcast (Link in comments) 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Hey, Lee Good morning. Wonderful to have you as a guest today on the podcast.

Lee: It's a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me, Sudha. I hope you're well.

Sudha: So, let's get started with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do. I'm really grateful to Stephen for the introductions that he made over email, but I'm keen to know more because I haven't really met with you.

Lee: Yeah, so my name is Lee. I'm a professor of strategic communications and public engagement at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and I've been there about seven years. Prior to that, I was at the University of Leeds, Manchester, and Leeds Beckett originally. My research area is focused on strategic communications, particularly public relations. That's the area I look at most. More recently, it has expanded into the area of public engagement and also media literacy, which ended up being quite nicely related to the type of work that I do.

I originally started in practice. I did about eight years working for the technology industries as a PR consultant. Like most PR practitioners I know, I kind of fell into it with no particular ambition to do PR, but just ended up there. I originally started in New Zealand, then I came back to London. I was mystified by the apparent power that Tony Blair's communications director, Alastair Campbell, had and how much he was hated because he was the proverbial spin doctor. I was working in the profession and didn't really feel like I was powerful at all.

So that led me to do a PhD focused on understanding how power works through public relations and in public relations as a profession. The rest is history, really. I've been working in academia now for just over 20 years and really love it.

Sudha: Wow, that's interesting. And I think that we should have another podcast episode, probably on your PhD, because like you, I'd agree that, yeah, we don't always feel very powerful as communications professionals. In fact, rather disempowered and often isolated, including with clients and within organisations.

Let's move on to the next question. We live in such divisive and polarised times. What do you think is the role of PR in society? We are so set in our views; we all think the choices or the sides that we take are the correct sides to be supported and advocated for.

We've seen, day before yesterday, the attempt on the presidential candidate in the US. All this is a result of the churn happening in society, the conflicts and the unease there. And, of course, communications professionals have a huge role, I believe, to play. We don't often get that opportunity. But between strategic advisors to the C-suite and spin doctors, which most people like to think of PR practitioners as, is there a happy medium between the two? A space that we can occupy with authenticity?

Lee: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really interesting question. There are perhaps two answers to it in the sense that I think currently there's the role that public relations as a profession and practitioners occupy, and there's the potential role that they could play. Currently, I think we oscillate between those two roles of strategic advice and spin doctor.

The strategic advice role is the one that has the most promise, in the sense that it's a role that is more reflective and considered as a contribution to the organisation. It doesn’t just take the organisation for granted and follow what the organisation says. It’s much more of a kind of critical friend type role. And I think that's got to be positive because organisations can become very self-oriented and absorbed with their own purposes. That’s just the nature of the beast. But public relations practitioners have this bridging role that is very valuable. The strategic advisory capacity is important for helping organisations understand the nature of the society they exist in.

The spin doctor role, I think, is what happens when practitioners don’t or aren’t able to take on that more strategic approach. To some degree, that's a question of organisational culture, the degree to which organisational leaders are able or willing to listen, and perhaps also the degree to which comms practitioners are able to make themselves relevant. There’s a challenge there, because if you end up being the spin doctor, you end up simply parroting what the organisation thinks is important, and that’s not necessarily what society needs. So I think that’s what currently happens.

There’s a lot of debate within the profession about the pros and cons of both roles and the desire to be seen as more strategic. I think there is also a much bigger role for communications professionals, particularly public relations professionals, because they are different from advertisers, branders, and marketers. They are more focused on dialogue, discussion, and engaging with audiences. There’s a lot of talk, for example, about relationship building and engaging in conversations. That gives the profession a platform to influence society and the way social dynamics unfold.

For instance, with the shooting of the presidential candidate at the weekend, the ways in which the communications profession responds should also reflect on how they might make interventions as a profession, not on behalf of their clients but as a profession. They should discuss how and why such events might happen, what rhetoric underpins them, and how one might change it and make concrete moves in that direction. They have a lot of influence; these are people who work with some of the biggest companies in the world and with some of the largest media conglomerates. I would like to see a more socially oriented professional identity than we have at the moment. I think that could have a really significant impact on the way people talk about division and debate.

Sudha: I think that's a very interesting perspective, Lee. And I also think, how we contribute to the discourse, whether we contribute just on when you know, strictly has a problem or there's some reality TV show or we are participating in issues that really make a difference to people and to society. I think, we need to definitely consider that.

Moving on from this, we're talking about the U. S. and of course the U. S. has been so prominent in the past couple of decades, not just because of its power, but, what has been happening in politics. So the 2016 U. S. elections, were a time when we saw a lot of fake news or biased news and it brought misinformation to the spotlight.

And there was a spotlight on the role of lobbyists, PR practitioners, foreign actors to build a particular narrative. It’s been eight years since that spotlight. Has there been any change in behaviour or is it more of the same? Because I noticed that, as practitioners, as an industry, we love to talk about things, but I don't think, we really address some of the issues root and branch and try to make a systemic change. What are your thoughts on this?

Lee:I think the reality is that the volume of misinformation that became very visible in 2016 is now normalised. I think that’s probably the case. It was interesting how little it was discussed in the UK election, for example. I’m not sure about the election in India—there have been so many elections—but I was struck by the fact that occasionally it was covered as an issue but not really picked up, and there was no significant monitoring of it as far as I could tell. Although I was away for some of the election time, so it may have happened in my absence.

I think the real...

119: Misinformation, Disposable Diversity, Ethics in PR with Prof. Lee Edwards, Department of Media and Communications London School of Economics and Political Science

Powered by Wave AI