Anti-PR

Why public relations is not press relations.

Public relations, as the term is used in practice, has come to mean the work of obtaining favourable attention in the press. Good PR is taken to mean good coverage. A successful PR effort is one that produces a flattering article, a quoted spokesperson, a campaign that lands. This is so widely assumed that it rarely occurs to anyone to question it.

It should be questioned, because it is a misunderstanding of the discipline at the level of its name. Public relations is not about the press. It is about how an organisation relates to its environment. The press is one part of that environment, and an important one. But an organisation that treats public relations as press relations has confused a part for the whole, and in doing so has inverted the order of cause and effect on which the discipline depends.

I use the term Anti-PR for the corrective. It is a deliberate provocation, and it is frequently misread, so let me be precise about what it does and does not claim.

What public relations actually is

The attention an organisation receives is a consequence of how it behaves towards the people and institutions it depends on. When an organisation cares more about its relationships than about its publicity, the coverage it receives follows from its conduct. That is the correct order. Reverse it – make publicity the objective and conduct the instrument – and the organisation is managing the symptom while neglecting the cause.

The public relations theorist James Grunig uses four models of public relations to make the distinction exact. The most primitive model, press agentry and publicity, is one-way communication whose purpose is favourable attention; accuracy is secondary to effect. The most developed model, two-way symmetrical communication, is dialogical: research-based, designed to bring the external environment into the organisation's decisions, and oriented towards mutual understanding rather than persuasion. What is colloquially called PR is the first model. What public relations ought to be is the fourth.

The same distinction appears in Grunig's contrast between buffering and bridging. Publicity-oriented PR is a buffering function: it sits between the organisation and its environment and manages perception so that the organisation can carry on as before. Relationship-oriented PR is a bridging function: it carries information across the boundary in both directions and changes the organisation's decisions as a result. The buffer protects the organisation from its environment. The bridge connects them. Only one of these produces durable credibility, because only one of them is anchored in what the organisation actually does.

This is why Anti-PR is not a softer or more ethical version of the same activity. It is a different activity. Press agentry seeks to shape what people think about the organisation. Relationship management changes what the organisation is. The first is communication about decisions already made. The second is participation in the decisions themselves.

Earning attention is not the same as seeking it

It is a reasonable objective to receive the attention an organisation deserves. It is an entirely different objective to receive positive attention. The two are routinely treated as the same goal, and they are not.

An organisation that aims to earn the attention it deserves accepts that the attention will track its conduct – favourable when its conduct merits it, unfavourable when it does not. The discipline this imposes is on behaviour, not on messaging. An organisation that aims to obtain positive attention has set itself a goal that is, in part, independent of its conduct: it wants the coverage to be better than the behaviour warrants. This is the press agentry objective, and it is structurally unstable. The gap between what the organisation does and what it claims has to be maintained by communication, and that gap widens under scrutiny rather than closing.

Arena dynamics make the instability concrete. Issues and organisations compete for finite attention according to selection principles the organisation does not control – drama, novelty, cultural resonance, political alignment. An organisation that tries to engineer its salience is playing on terrain governed by forces stronger than its press office. An organisation that lets its conduct determine its standing is doing something the arena cannot easily distort, because the conduct is real and is observed over time. The first approach treats attention as something to be captured. The second treats it as something to be deserved. Only the second is sustainable, because only the second does not depend on the audience failing to notice the difference.

Adverse publicity is a symptom

When trouble arises, the publicity-oriented reflex is to ask how unfavourable attention can be avoided or minimised. This is the wrong first question, and it is wrong for the same structural reason. Unfavourable publicity is rarely the problem. It is the symptom of a problem – something happened, someone was affected – and the organisation's task is to address what happened and to take care of those affected, in action first and in communication second. Action must always come before words.

I have set out the handling of difficult situations at length elsewhere and will not repeat it here. The point relevant to Anti-PR is narrower: an organisation that has spent its quiet years cultivating publicity rather than relationships enters its first serious difficulty with no relational reserve to draw on. It has optimised for the wrong thing. The relationships that carry an organisation through trouble cannot be assembled once trouble has begun. They are either there or they are not, and what determines which is the orientation the organisation adopted long before it was tested.

What Anti-PR is not

The term invites two misreadings, and both should be dismissed directly.

It is not hostility to the press. The provocation is aimed at a conception of public relations that is oriented towards favourable visibility, not at journalism. The fourth estate performs a function that an organisation serious about its relationships has every reason to respect, including when its work is uncomfortable. An organisation that relates well to its environment has nothing to fear from a press doing its job, and good relationship management produces good press relations as a by-product. The objection is to making the press the target of the work rather than one participant in the environment the work serves.

It is also not concealment. Anti-PR has nothing to do with hiding, managing down, or obscuring unwelcome facts. The opposite is the case. The two governing principles are to see the situation as it is and to say it as it is – to assess honestly, including when honesty is inconvenient, and to disclose on the organisation's own initiative when an issue will become public. An organisation that delivers its own bad news retains some control over framing, timing, and context. An organisation that conceals loses that control entirely the moment the information surfaces through other means, as it generally does. Concealment is not the relational posture. It is the publicity posture in its most defensive form.

Relationship-orientation is foundational, not tactical

The deeper claim is that relationship-orientation belongs to an organisation's foundation, while publicity-seeking is, at best, situational – and that situational positioning without a foundation does not hold.

A foundational posture is one an organisation maintains regardless of the current agenda: stable, derived from its structural exposure, demonstrated consistently through conduct rather than asserted when convenient. Caring about relationships is foundational in exactly this sense. It is not a campaign. It is a standing orientation that produces, as a secondary effect, the credibility on which every situational communication then draws.

Publicity-seeking has the opposite character. It is reactive, episodic, and pegged to whatever the organisation wishes to be seen favourably for at a given moment. It generates claims rather than demonstrations and claims that lack a foundational basis lose their legitimacy over time, because the audience eventually compares what is said with what is done. This is the general failure mode of situational communication detached from a foundation, and publicity-oriented PR is its purest instance: a sequence of situational assertions resting on no foundation at all, each requiring the next to sustain it.

This is why the choice between the two orientations is not a matter of style or temperament. It is a matter of whether the communication function is doing structural work or cosmetic work – whether it is building the relational infrastructure on which the organisation's standing actually rests or decorating a position that the next difficult moment will expose. The first is slow, unglamorous, and durable. The second is quick, visible, and brittle.

Anti-PR is simply the insistence that the discipline do the first kind of work and stop mistaking the second kind for it.

Publicity is sought. Reputation is earned. The function that confuses the two will, in the end, achieve neither.

My thinking on corporate communications is laid out here: www.jorgenchristiansen.no/how