A series of new movies has thrown the spotlight on the relationship between the media and public relations.
It’s been a while since this was a hot theme. One of my favourite movies, 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success, featured Tony Curtis playing a sleazy publicist buttering up the twisted diarist JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster).
Black and white, twisted noir emotions, cool back-alley jazz soundtrack. Classic lines like “you can’t kid a kidder” - say it in Noo Yawk. You won’t find a more cynical portrayal of the PR-journo tango.
Of course we’ve had All The President’s Men and other journalist-as-investigative-hero movies in the interim, but with the interface between large institutions and the media now the subject of real interest among the general public (thanks, it would seem, to the media coverage of ’spin doctors’), we are seeing the PR or comms specialist yanked out from stage left and his work exposed.
The way modern American thriller movies do PR is usually a matter of high hilarity. Witness Colin Farrell in the opening scene of Phone Booth, pumping down Broadway, cutting deals on his ‘cell’ to land his client a magazine front page, before spending the rest of the film trapped in a phone box under the watchful eye of a sniper. He had it coming to him….no PR is that good.
Now we get State of Play. A clever thriller but with a hugely sentimental message - the final story makes the front page, not some on online manifestation. It’s in flat contradiction of the shifting balance in real life right now.
There’s a great cameo of a vain and venal PR man (”he runs an office during the week and parties hard at weekends”), and a plainly ridiculous take on modern journalism, with Russell Crowe’s character finishing his mega-expose and then pressing the send button (cue presses rolling). Right, Russell, never mind the subs, the lawyers and the editor…
Now we’ve got In The Loop. Never has so much creative cursing been so utterly hilarious. But as a version of any kind of reality it really is depressing to hear many people believing that government communications is like this.
From my experience of working with central government comms, the film is mostly a product of director Armando Iannucci’s surreal, feverish imagination. His aim is about as targetted as a dragnet trawler - he scoops up the whole system with his trademark savage humour.
Encouraged by the fly-onthe-wall camerawork, it’s amazing how many people think it’s accurate. And Alastair Campbell has been figured as the inspirational motherlode for Peter Capaldi’s fizzing, stand-well-back nutter, and the culture of bullying and smearing. In The Loop is a caricature of government, a satire about institutionalised intimidation. But real-life PR?
Campbell’s influence was based on the fact that he, shock horror, exploited the access he held in his power - to the PM, to interviews, to leaks, intel and stories. Yes, that is the day-to-day reality.
In a wonderfully illuminating interview on BBC’s Culture Show recently, Campbell was bemused that anyone could find In The Loop either funny or truthful. His interviewer seemed to believe, from his questions, that all government comms was like this.
Between them was a seemingly unbridgeable chasm. The idealist wondering why governments can’t just tell the truth. And the pragmatic let’s-go-to-work communicator, sense of humour expertly by-passed, fully prepared to articulate his PM’s ‘tough choices.’
It’s a very 21st century duality. We modern-day communicators must retain our principles - and at the same time, we must work with the world as it is, not as we’d like it to be.
Hmm, come to think, wasn’t that another Campbell-created soundbite?
Tags: communications, In The Loop, Manchester public relations, public relations, spin doctor
