Editorial: Getting the message across

ALL around the world, in recent decades, media spokesmen have become increasingly important for governments, corporations and civil society bodies. Their key job is to get over their organization’s point of view, whether it is to counter negative publicity that has arisen, or to promote a new initiative or campaign.
At their best, press and publicity departments perform a genuine service keeping the media, members of the public and stakeholders well informed. In a world with many and varied calls on everybody’s attention, a straightforward message, clearly presented, is of real value.
Of course, typically in the case of corporate communications, there will be a suspicion that a positive gloss is being put on what is in reality a troubling situation. Whether in the world of finance or wider corporate affairs, there have been plenty of examples in recent years of outright denials by press officers, of developments that very quickly prove to be true.
The arguments from a company management’s point of view will be that they were struggling to reverse a catastrophic situation, and coming clean would have ensured that the catastrophe would have occurred, thus, as the current parlance has it, “destroying shareholder value.”
Governments and civil society organizations have a different level of responsibility in putting out their messages. Citizens and stakeholders need to know where they stand and rightly expect to be told in a timely and clear manner. Thus governments in building policy, for example on housing or inoculation programs, need to consider the strategic demands of properly publicizing what they are trying to achieve. They can therefore ensure that the often considerable investment of state funds, secures the greatest benefit for the largest number of people.
And it is here it seems that government agencies in the Kingdom are falling down on the job. The recent survey by the Ministry of Culture and Information produced the stark finding that the majority of official spokesmen, fully 64 percent, had had no formal training whatsoever. This may well be the reason that the survey also found that almost a third of government spokesman were unprofessional in their relations with the press and media.
In many countries, press spokesman are often former journalists who, as hard-bitten news reports would have it, have “changed sides.” However there is now excellent training available, at both graduate and technical college level, for people who wish to make a career in public relations. While, just as in journalism, experience in the end counts for a great deal more than classroom learning, these courses do give entrants to the profession, a very sound grounding.
Yet it appears that in the Kingdom, too many people are appointed to public relations jobs, which are of considerable importance, with little reference to any training, nor even it seems to their suitability for what can be a demanding and sometimes difficult job. Thus when the press and media need to find out what is happening in a particular government department, they are given little or no assistance and on occasions cannot even find out there whereabouts of the spokesman whose job it ought to be to brief them.
This is not to decry the performance of a few outstanding exponents of public relations skills in some official departments and important government concerns. However without exception these individuals are working successfully within a predefined framework, where they can find out information that is needed and disseminate it efficiently.
The problem facing most people appointed to the PR role is that they are given an office, a desk and a phone and no formal structure within which they are supposed to function. Indeed many top people in a government department may be only dimly aware of the existence of a PR department, and even less clear on how they can make it perform to the benefit of their organization. Thus while it is easy for press and public to criticize less capable PR officers, in the end, their lack of training is frequently being compounded by a parlous lack of support from the body whose messages they are supposed to be spreading.
It probably boils down to a generally poor appreciation of the benefits of powerful and proactive public relations. The Kingdom is now stranger to good advertising and in the corporate world, the business of marketing is being taken ever more seriously, with a consequent benefit to a business’ bottom line. But public relations, especially at governmental level, appears to be the poor relation. Change will only come from the top, with an understanding of what PR can achieve and the commitment to the proper structures, resources and training, to allow the transformation to happen.