Despite dim view of public relations, it may be needed

— -- Sleazy. Disingenuous. These are words used in U.K. newspaper coverage of the public relations industry.

PR, oddly enough, doesn't have great PR. People tend to think that PR involves being manipulative and saying whatever is in the employer's best interests.

Authors Trevor Morris and Simon Goldsworthy, both PR professionals, don't disagree.

"There is much more gray than black and white in the field of PR ethics," they write in PR: A Persuasive Industry: Spin, Public Relations and the Shaping of the Modern Media. They call PR an amoral industry, a tool for good or evil purposes. There was, alas, Hitler, Goebbels, and the Nazi propaganda machine.

Morris and Goldsworthy have participated in university debates on whether PR has a duty to tell the truth. Industry professionals come down on both sides of the issue. Some say that PR is generally truthful, while others believe that white lies are part of the job. A poll of industry insiders revealed that most professionals don't feel telling the truth is a duty of PR.

Corporate PR is what comes to mind when discussing the PR industry. But non-governmental organizations, so-called NGOs, like Greenpeace and Amnesty International rely heavily on PR.

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One group that often derides PR professionals is journalists, who often see themselves as truth-seekers forced to deal with flacks in order to get information. Yet without the PR industry, argue Morris and Goldsworthy, there would be very little news.

A 2008 study of news stories in U.K. newspapers found that more than half contained mostly PR material. A study in the Columbia Journalism Review found that more than half the stories in an edition of The Wall Street Journal "were based solely on press releases."

Good PR is often subtle, informing an even larger percentage of news stories, the authors argue. "If journalists do not get their stories from PR, where else do they obtain them," Morris and Goldsworthy ask. Most journalists tend to be alerted to newsworthy stories, and most alerts can be traced back to PR.