by Eric Sparling

I owe you an apology. I've lied, cheated and swindled. Yeah, I know. You've done that, too, but I did it professionally. I spent this past year working in a public relations agency.

Let me boil it down for you. The job had one goal: make you care about the things my clients cared about, even if they were inconsequential to your life. Unfortunately, I often succeeded. I didn't work for Hitler or anything, just huge corporations with one common purpose: make money for their shareholders.

You see, only giant corporations can afford to hire PR agencies. With only one year's experience to my credit, my boss was billing me out to clients at US $120 per hour. With that kind of cash changing hands, you can bet that only one perspective was going to be represented by me--the one that had serious financial backing.

Business is booming. We outnumber journalists and the gap is increasing. The reason is simple: public relations works.

We write stories that our clients want us to write, send them to newspapers, magazines or TV stations and journalists write their stories using our information. Often they'll get another perspective on the topic by contacting another source and call that "balanced reporting."

Sometimes they won't--we really liked it when that happened. It meant that our message wasn't diluted by an opposing opinion. If we were lucky, the journalists we contacted would be lazy or overworked. That way they wouldn't have the time or energy to come up with their own story angles, quotes or research, and they'd just use ours--our quotes, our research, our priorities.

Every day began with scanning the papers to find stories about our clients. Then a fax would come through from a company that monitors the airwaves, letting us know whether anything about our clients was broadcast during the previous week.

Once we got hold of the news stories, we'd scan them to see if our "story" made it into the journalist's piece. Sometimes the headline we wrote in our news release would be the headline of the article in the newspaper. Sometimes the article was our news release, the only change being the addition of a reporter's name at the top. When that happened, it was called a "good hit," and we'd send it through to the client as justification of our exorbitant fees.

Why should you care? Simple. I promise you that you have read a spin doctor's words as you've scanned through your daily newspaper. The quote that is attributed to the CEO of the company in that front page article? He never said it--a PR guy created that quote and faxed it to the journalist in a news release. The editorial letter from the irate president of the union? A PR guy wrote it, it passed through the hands of six bureaucrats, and the president finally gave his seal of approval. Whole sentences, sometimes entire paragraphs, will be pulled directly from a news release and reprinted in a newspaper, words that were written by guys like me with the specific intent of convincing you to be a customer of my client.

Look, if the most important news actually made it into the paper, every day the front-page headline would read, "The developing world still isn't using condoms, the industrial world is living beyond the planet's means, and none of us will care how our stocks are doing when we're on our death beds."

That's the stuff that matters, but no one has figured out how to make money out of it, so PR agencies don't represent it. Instead, we read about a cool new soft drink.

I did it for a year before I was utterly disgusted. I didn't tell too many lies and I don't think I was responsible for any environmental catastrophes.

Some of my former colleagues might not speak to me after they read this. I guess I'm letting the cat out of the bag. Well, it had to be done, because every day you are being lied to by guys like me.

Don't believe it when you read a story about heart disease and the statistics they use come from a pharmaceutical company--even if they quote a doctor (they're on the payroll too).

Well, I've burned that bridge. I've joined the ranks of the great unemployed masses. One thing I'll say for public relations--it paid well. I guess that's how they get people to do it.