Blogging plays perfectly into the hands of flacks, said Richard W. Edelman, president and chief executive of the public-relations firm that bears his name during a keynote at PR Week's
annual awards show. "It used to be I would schmooze you and I was your flack," Edelman said. "Today, if we want to get a message into the public's conversation, we just make a
post on a blog." And why does that strategy work? "P.R. plays much better in a world that lacks trust," Edelman declared, because people no longer believe in a single source.
Readers no longer take what The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal say at face value; they go to several sources to consume different points of view. Edelman said blogging makes
it more possible than ever for a PR firm to retort claims made by a news source. "If The Wall Street Journal goes after a client, we don't have to accept that anymore. Let's post the
documents we gave The Journal; let's show the interviews the newspaper decided not to show." It's an interesting--and not incorrect--assessment of the state of public opinion: the erosion
of trust in government, news media, and big corporations plays perfectly into the hands of flack biz. In the new media world truth is completely up for grabs: it's there to be muddied, subverted or
refined by whoever can gain the biggest share of the public's trust. Therefore, said Edelman, image protection is a "discipline on the rise."
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