Chris Grimshaw

Editors of the Sun have long maintained a very cosy relationship with Downing Street, David Yelland, former editor of the Sun and now Senior Vice Chairman of Weber Shandwick UK, has revealed. Indeed the secret of great media manipulation is the personal touch. Improving the reputation of the Metropolitan Police, he said, was due to 'long lunches, drinks and dinners'.

His revelations were given at this year's annual 'PR and the Media Conference', organised by PR Week, which took place in the plush surroundings of the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane on 23rd March 2005. Getting a press pass to PR conferences is no simple matter, but with perseverence and the NUJ on our side, Corporate Watch was there.

Yelland seemed uncomfortable giving his talk, perhaps because the previous speaker Andrew Gilligan, of David Kelly/Hutton Inquiry fame, had taken every available opportunity to denounce the 'bullies and liars' of the tabloid press. Other highlights included talks by Dylan Jones, editor of best-selling men's magazine GQ, and the PR confessions of John Godel of Independent Radio News, who gave some idea of just how much of our news is really public relations material.

Unlike some journalists speaking at the conference, Dylan Jones has a very favourable attitude to PR, 'in many ways being a PR in this day and age is far more dignified than being a journalist,' he suggested. And he loves celebrity product endorsement, 'I’d be a mug not to be interested in a Ford Focus driven by a celebrity', because to him 'there are only two thriving arts – advertising and publicity'. Its perhaps unsurprising then that so much of his magazine is sourced from PR agencies; 'There are 155 pages in GQ, 88 pages generated by PRs,' he said.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that a publication as ruthlessly commercial as GQ recycles so much PR material, but the revelations of Jon Godel, Editor of Independent Radio News (IRN), were more disturbing. IRN is like ITN for radio; it provides 22 news bulletins per day to 273 radio stations across the UK, including Classic FM and Capital. It reaches 23 million adults each week. If your message is part of IRN, 'then you’ve got into people’s lives,' he said. When asked how much of the content of IRN's bulletins is PR-sourced he said, 'I could say 90% of news was generated by PR – we all fall for it because we want to. There’s no-one from Media Guardian here, is there? But, OK, forty percent of news is directly related to PR campaigns.'