JEDDAH, 30 January 2008 — Unethical public relations (PR) practitioners were held accountable yesterday for feeding the media with negative messages.
In an intense discussion on the relationship between the media and public relations, Mamdoh Al-Rouhani, media and marketing communication consultant and general manager of the Riyadh-based Manning Selvage and Lee (MS&L), said, “If the PR practitioner did not practice the profession negatively, he would never open the door for the media to abuse the company or reflect a negative image,” adding that “any news is good news. When the PR person is competent and has expertise, then he is able to convey the targeted message of the company to the public.”
Shoura Council member Abdul Rahman Al-Anad said the media are to blame for defaming the image of enterprises. “Media search for exciting and negative news to write about. If you invite reporters to attend an event celebrating the progress or achievements of a company, they won’t attend. But if something bad happens, everyone shows up,” he said.
Saleh Al-Hamamy, associate account manager at Asda’a PR company, told Arab News that it’s the PR’s responsibility to ensure credibility and efficiency of the news they deliver to the media.
“Any successful businessman or enterprise must have a successful competent PR representatives. However, writing press releases and the media contribute 5 percent only to the success of PR,” he said.
In his presentation, Al-Rouhani disclosed results of a survey conducted by UK’s Henley Center on sources of trusted information. The results showed that 90 percent of trusted news come from husbands or partners, 82 percent come from friends, 69 percent from work colleagues, 50 percent from television news, 27 percent from retailers, 27 percent from manufacturers and 14 percent from the government. According to him, one of the obstacles that people in PR face is anti-campaigns. “It’s normal to have a competitive atmosphere between different businesses, but it’s abnormal and unprofessional to attack and defame other enterprises. In 2003, a local newspaper fabricated an article raising questions about Al-Marai Company’s IPO,” said Al-Rouhani while displaying the article on screen. “The company suffered so many problems because of this,” he added.
He further said that a research conducted in the past five months to study and evaluate the level of journalists’ knowledge of the stock market they write about, showed that 62 percent of them have no or false knowledge, 50 percent have knowledge and experience, 10 percent have acceptable knowledge and 23 percent have limited knowledge.
Obaid Saad Al-Abdali, aide to the rector of Prince Sultan University, said in the field of PR, employees work with people and not for them. He also called for closing down all PR departments because members of an enterprise - including managers and security guards - must all be PR representatives of their business.
“When talking to the chairman of Al-Rajhi Bank, he said that the bank has employees who deserve SR1,000 a month and others who are worth SR3 millions because they are ambassadors for their companies,” Al-Abdali said.
He then raised two reflective questions to the audience regarding the culture of PR in the country. “Would you marry your daughter/sister to a PR practitioner? Will you marry a female PR practitioner? PR people are known as liars and deceivers in the community,” he pointed out.
Searching for articles on the Internet about “public relations” in both Arabic and English languages, he found 90,100,000 articles in English on Google and 502,000 articles in Arabic.
