When corporations or banks are caught misbehaving these days, there is often gleeful talk in the media of a “PR disaster”. Such has been the case with the reporting of News Corp’s phonehacking, Barclays’s fixing of the LIBOR rate and BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This privileging of image over real-world consequences has been expedited by an industry that is proving remarkably recession-proof. That PR “operatives” today outnumber journalists in Britain is a setback for humanity’s quest for evidential truth but it is a sign of relative health for an industry that makes £3bn a year.
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