--------posted on behalf of Gwenda Tan-------
Hi guys, I am nearing the last month of my internship. It has been an invaluable eye-opening experience for me and I truly appreciate the opportunity and exposure that this module has given me. I’m sure we all feel the same way!
This post is a little sensitive in my opinion. Honestly, I do not know how much I can reveal about what I observed over the past 2 months, but certain things we will only really know when we are the surreptitious drivers. Should these be counted as trade secrets?
In Public Relations, our job as a consultancy is mainly to provide expertise and knowledge to fit in with our clients’ key messages, mission and vision. As such, we should be doing what we are told to do in order to benefit our clients. Then again, there is that ever-persistent issue with ethics.
Over the period of my internship, besides drafting media invites, releases, factsheets – simply media documents for clients, I have also learnt that talking points and quotes supposedly deriving from clients are also drafted by the PR agency. These documents then go through levels of vetting and approval before they go out to the media.
Simply put, I draft what I think you should say, I send it across for approval, you think the quote I came up with is acceptable, I send that out. This process has led me to consider of the true credibility of PR.
We have often been reminded that advertising and PR is different, in the sense that advertising is paid promotion, and PR is more “real”. However, after I have been exposed to this, I begin to doubt the credibility of news. Where I had always known PR to be more truthful, the phrase “Seeing is believing” is now “Seeing (behind the scenes), is believing”.
Have I said too much?
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