The dangers of irresponsible PR policy
A public relations officer typically does one of two things: they grease the wheels of communication or they clog them.
Last year, the Associated Students of the University of Nevada created a public relations position.
This past week, the director of campus relations created a new set of media policies for everyone involved in the executive branch: the vice president, campus clubs, campus programming, homecoming and the attorney general.
The memo sent out by Meghan Wagonseller, the new PR person for ASUN, straddles the line of grease and clog in the wheels of accurate communication to you.
“Please, at all times, direct a media reporter to the director of a department, the director of campus relations, or the president if an interview deals with factual information or the Associated Students of the University of Nevada as a whole,” she wrote in the memo.
An innocuous line can easily translate into controlling access to information instead of making information accessible.
Strongly controlled information leads to incomplete or one-sided information —it doesn’t lead to the truth.
Granted, it falls into a public relations professional’s realm to spin information to their benefit and protect the image of their employer. But to stop the flow of information is irresponsible to the public and to their employer.
As Alan Harrington, an author, said in Forbes magazine, “Public relations specialists make flower arrangements of the facts, placing them so the wilted, less attractive petals are hidden by the sturdy blooms.”
Shaping information is the focus of public relations professionals – not shutting off access to it, especially in an area as vital as government.
Not that we think Reilly and Wagonseller will make such a brazen attempt or that they could succeed if they tried. There are too many people in the student government, as it is in the real world, who want to share important happenings with the public and add the press into the balance of powers.
As a final message to you, to Reilly, to Wagonseller and to anyone else involved in distributing information, we say this: public discourse will balance itself out if information is freely given and accessible.
You take care of the first part, without censorship and without hardline control, and we will do the rest.
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