ABSTRACT
In a consideration of “PR, lies and post-truth politics,” that drew upon Hannah Arendt's (1972) essay, Lying in Politics, Anne Cronin (2018, p. 113) proposed that “PR's capacities to both manage truths and broker new forms of promise place PR in a privileged position in today's new socio-political context.” Public relations (PR) people pursue persuasive goals and seek to influence different institutions within the public sphere in the modern context of post-truth or what US comedian Stephen Colbert has called “truthiness.” Colbert coined the phrase in 2005 and used it to denote the trend of statements being made and accepted on the basis of how truthful they felt rather than any basis in evidence, logic, intellectual examination or fact. My own understanding of post-truth is that is a social condition that arises from two communication behaviours: (1) The willingness of senders of messages to use falsehoods in public communication in order to win debates and influence opinion; (2) The willingness of audiences to accept the “truthy” messages and informational propositions of senders whose messages suit their opinions. In undertaking persuasive work in this context, PR people have the means, opportunity and incentive to exercise their informational intermediary role in a form of epistemological authoritarianism. That is to say, PR workers have the capacity to exploit their position of informational strength to influence debate, whether in the form of introduction of new facts or by controlling access to key players such as politicians and celebrities who make contributions to debate. Such informational power can be derived from the proximity PR people enjoy to the dominant coalitions in client organisations, whether they are political parties, corporations or charities. But there is a tension constraining the exercise of this power; PR people's role as providers of information to the public domain only endures over time if it is built upon high levels of trust and reliability with the media that use that material. In the case of mass media such as broadcast TV news, attempts to introduce falsehoods are normally swiftly identified and the source discredited. The knowledge produced by PR people in their role as informational intermediaries is intended to inform or to persuade, and is almost always part of broader plan to generate and distribute a message that will engage an audience and achieve a desired effect. The balance between the informational and persuasion priorities of PR is important to ethical and sustainable 88practice of PR, as well as justifying a social value as part of a process that introduces information to debates in the public sphere. The appearance of fake news in PR and campaigning is a result of a focus on persuasion only with little regard to the veracity of its information component, in a win at all costs style of aggressive campaigning. Yet the contribution of PR to the making of truth and introducing new facts to debate through press releases, research reports and other content, places the work of PR workers in the philosophical realm of “veritism,” which denotes the way truth is attached to the people who produce and distribute knowledge (Fuller, 1988). This chapter attempts to explore matters of veritism in PR in the times of post-truth, and consider a style of public communication that views facts as irrelevant, holds expertise in disdain and replaces rationality with emotionality and distraction.
