POSTURING CLICHE

Journalists nurture the belief that PRs are vain, self-important fools who can't communicate in English. This is of course an unfair generalisation but every so often the cliche gets confirmed. Here's PR man Mark Borkowski 'writing' in Media Guardian about someone else in the business

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2007/02/the_power_behind_the_freud.html

"Just as a thousand liggers sharpened their patter to pass the clipboard test to slither into post Oscar parties, four days later in London I suspect the wannabes will try to assemble at Matthew Freud's send off hurrah for his arch lieutenant, Kris Thykier.
Tonight's bash promises to mimic some of the sumptuous parties that attracted the film glitterati in la la land. It has to be a fitting send off to mark the passing of a Freudian legend. I suspect it is not the whiff of vintage champagne and gourmet canapés that is enticing, but the promise of a networking frenzy.
Some whisper that Thykier has gone one better than his boss by exiting the mores of PRsville, at an age Matthew proclaimed that he would leave the profession, but has yet to find the egress. Kris leaves the PR world at a point when it is struggling to stamp real authority; it is a very different world to the one he entered as a callow youth a decade and a half ago."

What the fucking, shitting, buggering hell are you on about, you cock? What does 'exiting the mores of Prsville' actually mean? Also, you originally wrote "morays of PRsville". Illiterate cock.

"I first met him in a sweaty comedy club when I was promoting a forgotten household japester. My account handler at the time was none other than the brilliant author Jane Green who advised me to snap up the handsome dude before Matthew Freud. Jane spotted his talent but I couldn't be persuaded to scoop up the elegant young Turk. Perhaps he was just too good looking. I remember a self assured and determined kid that had his destiny mapped out. It's one hire that I regret I didn't make.
Matthew Freud his boss and mentor, entwined Thykier in his holy trinity of directors: all with differing skills they became the perfect set of clubs, fundamental in building the Freud brand. He has certainly helped morph it into something that is both respected and loathed, depending on your view of public relations. I am firmly in the camp that embraces the way Freuds have kicked the biz up the arse over the last two decades. Thykier bows out perhaps at the time when there are far too many practioners that have no idea what the game is."

"Brilliant author", "handsome dude", "elegant young Turk", "self assured and determined kid", "kicked the biz up the arse". Does this greasy sycophant have any idea how fucking ridiculous he sounds? Also, what the fuck is a "household japester"? Is it a comedian or something different? If it's a comedian, call it a fucking comedian. Cock.

"Kris is the consummate PR: not a posturing cliché but a bright and effectual operator..." etc ad nauseam.

There is much more of this stuff, including a baffling description of Thykier as "a true Argonaut", but enough is, in this case, more than enough.

PRs try hard to be seen as serious professionals providing a key service to the modern media. In a single article, Borkowski has kicked their image back to 1983. Cock.

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MORE BBC

Iain Dale has this to say on the BBC's desire to get exclusives

"Surely the role of BBC News is to report the news, rather than create it. Surely it is the role of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition to challenge those in power, rather than BBC journalists. BBC journalists are there to report the news in the most impartial manner possible. That's not to say that no BBC journalist should report on matters unfavourable to those who wield power, but the story has to warrant it.

We need fewer hyped up reports which start with the words "the BBC has learned". This sentence is used to create the impression that a journalist has been burrowing away to discover information which someone has tried to keep from them. Sometimes that is indeed the case, but it often means that they have either picked up some good gossip which is worth a punt, or they have been leaked some information by someone with an agenda. You'll see the same thing on the front page of The Times most days. "

I don't agree completely but I think there is a lot in What Iain Dale says. The BBC is agonising over its failure to win much at the Royal Television Society awards and has identified 'exclusives' as the means of doing better next year.

Fair enough but, our expectations of the BBC are slightly different than those we have of newspapers. They have a duty to be impartial and to get things right, even if that is sometimes at the expense of splashy exclusives. That, essentially, was were the BBC went wrong over Gilligan/Kelly/Hutton.

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IS THE BBC BIASED?

Robin Aitken, a former BBC reporter, has written a book arguing that the corporation has a systematic left-wing bias on matters such as Europe, immigration, the war in Iraq and so on. He was debating the issue at the ICA this evening with Peter Horrocks, BBC head of News, Tim Gardam, the former Channel 4 boss, and Jane Seaton, the BBC's official historian.

I'm not in any doubt that the BBC has a liberal bias - not a systematic centrally controlled political agenda but a set of widely shared and largely unchallenged cultural assumptions around, for example, multiculturalism, discrimination, Europe, the Third World and much else - and, even though I share many of these assumptions, I think it's wrong, even dangerous, that a publicly-funded broadcaster should be so blinkered.

These allegations have been around for a long time and the BBC has traditionally denied them robustly. Recently, though, some BBC people have begun to acknowledge that there might be problem, and so it was with Peter Horrocks, this evening.

Horrocks can't help the way he looks but he very much fits the stereotype of an upper-middle class intellectual grandee looking down his flared nostrils at the rest of us. He did accept some of what Aitken said though he denied that the BBC had a liberal bias.

His view was that, on issues like Europe and immigration, the BBC had focussed on the debate as it is in Westminster and ignored the wider spread of views held by the public at large. So the BBC had failed to represent Eurosceptic and anti-immigration views, for example.

There may be something in this but I don't think it's the full story. I think a more accurate explanation would be that the BBC was reflecting issues in the way that they tend to be reflected in the broadly liberal metropolitan circles in which BBC staff move. As a London media type, I rarely meet people who profess themselves strongly anti-European or anti-immigration. I rarely, to be honest, meet people who admit to holding Conservative views (unless it's the touchy-feely green Conservatism of David Cameron). It's easy to see how people who move in such circles could come to believe that these views are beyond the pale - when, in fact, they may well be the dominant opinions of the British public generally.

Anyway, even if Horrocks can't bring himself to accept the reality of bias at the Corporation, it's good to see senior figures acknowledge that all is not well at the BBC. Let's see if they put it right.

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"Writer James Delingpole, who was at Oxford University with David Cameron, has been mischievously telling friends that the Tory leader did not entirely give up smoking cannabis after being punished for it at Eton. Suddenly, though, Delingpole has become more discreet.

“I’m not going there,” he said yesterday. Lord Delingpole has a certain ring, don’t you think?"

This little item in the Atticus column of the Sunday Times apparently conceals a deep well of bitterness. Delingpole, a nice, rather right-wing writer, is thought by ST editor John Witherow to have some tales worth telling about David Cameron. Delingpole refuses to spill and has received an email from the ST refusing to take any further pieces from him. Delingpole is a freelance writer who makes at least part of his living from the articles he sells to newspapers, so it is possible to admire his principled stand. But the fact that he needs to keep schtumm perhaps suggests that Cameron has more to hide than a couple of spliffs at the age of 15.

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BBC - BITCHING BY COLLEAGUES

The BBC was highly pleased with tonight's story by security correspondent Frank Gardner, who purported to reveal how and why the US might attack Iran. The story led the News at Ten and was heavily trailed in advance. Less impressed was the BBC's US correspondent Matt Frei; when the Ten crossed to Washington for his take he commented loftily: "The US would respond if Iran attacked it: some would consider that obvious". The waspish Gardner was not given the chance to respond.

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