What TV and movies keep getting wrong about PR

Few professions are so widely misunderstood as public relations. OK, so maybe actuaries are up there, too, and of course geophysicists. But generally, almost nobody grasps what PR people actually do.

“Marketing, right?” your friends ask. “Advertising, no?” your own mother wants to know. “You basically rescue bigshots in a crisis, yes?” your neighbor once wondered. This stuff gets old fast.

This is unfortunate because PR people are hardly a rare species anymore. Public relations specialists nationwide now number some 272,000, according to the U.S.  Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s more than the populations of either Reno, Nevada or Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And that’s a lot of people going through life profoundly misunderstood.

Possibly the biggest reason for this massive misapprehension is, ironically enough, a matter of public relations. Our profession—whose primary purpose, after all, is to affect, change and, yes, even steer public perception—is often poorly perceived.

Responsibility for this mostly lies with how popular culture typically portrays my colleagues and I. Across all media—TV, movies, books, magazines and beyond—PR people are slotted neatly into a convenient stereotype.