by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
There is a precise and predictable inverse relationship between the work of journalists and the work of the public relations industry.
Good investigative journalists work to inform the public about the activities of the rich and powerful. They uncover secrets known only to a few, and share those secrets with the rest of us.
Public relations, on the other hand, works to control and limit the public's access to information about the rich and powerful. PR has its own techniques of investigation--techniques which range from opinion polling to covert surveillance of citizen activists. Rather than studying the few for the benefit of the many, these techniques study the many for the benefit of the few.
PR Watch seeks to serve the public rather than PR. With the assistance of whistleblowers and a few sympathetic insiders, we report about the secretive activities of an industry which works behind the scenes to control government policy and shape public opinion.
In recognition of these activities, PR Watch editors John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton have recently been honored by Project Censored, a university-based organization which each year selects what it considers the most under-reported stories in the United States. Project Censored selected The PR Industry's War on Activists, our article in last year's Covert Action Quarterly, as the "fourth most censored" story of 1996.
We are pleased, of course, by this recognition. Meanwhile, the PR industry keeps rolling. This issue reports on the Public Affairs Council's latest "National Grassroots Conference." It offers chilling examples of the industry's increasingly sophisticated technological reach into people's lives, and its indifference to the rights of the people whom it is thus manipulating.
Fortunately, PR Watch and other public interest groups are also becoming increasingly sophisticated. As a step in this direction, we have developed our own permanent web site at <http://www.prwatch.org/>.
