Images of Public Relations in the Print Media

Abstract

Twenty years of research indicates that journalists hold a negative, often antagonistic, attitude toward the public relations field and public relations practitioners. The research reported herein examines how those attitudes influence print re- porters' connotative use of the terms public relations and PR in their stories. Eighty-four published examples containing the term public relations or PR were analyzed revealing seven different connotative themes or definitions: distraction, disaster, challenge, hype, merely, war, and schmooze. In over 80% of the cases, the journalist used the terms in a negatively embedded context, thus supporting recent research indicating that journalists are far from being objective in their use of linguistic descriptors.

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