Multiple Visits

One of the great and most beloved novels of all-time is Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." Let's be honest, if it weren't so loved, then why would Hollywood have bothered to make so many movie and television specials on it over the years? (This does not include all the theatrical productions that continue to be put together each year.) The main part of the story is when Ebenezer Scrooge, the main character, is visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future the night of Christmas Eve. As is widely known, he awakes from his traumatic night a new and more kind-hearted man with a much more loving outlook on life.

I see some parallels between Scrooge's evolution and that of the public relations profession. Over the past nearly 150 years, it, too, has had close encounters with multiple versions of itself. The first visit came from what I might call the Ghost of  Anything Goes. In this colorful version, communicating with mass audiences was carried out in a free-spirited manner.  Make your message as exciting and colorful as possible with little regard for straight-forward facts. The second visit came from the Ghost of Analysis. It is here where an array of scholars and high-level thinkers took a hard look at the act of communication and produced a series of theories and models explaining the workings of this act.

Finally, the third visit, which happens to be going on right now, is from what I perceive to be the Ghost of Accountability. In our current times of societal division, there appears to be much disagreement over what used to be indisputable: facts and truth. Given that context, people, particularly public figures, seem to be giving greater weight to their opinions and perspectives rather than hard facts. At the same time, there appears to be a trend suggesting those same people may be coming to realize the truth is not be tossed aside or even ignored. Those, such as elected officials and talking-heads within the media, seem to be losing their audiences. They are beginning to be held accountable for playing loose with the facts.