No more hot air about PR

I wonder whether Yunus Momoniat (The dirty business of shaping perceptions, August 10) paused for a moment before deciding that a lazy pot shot against public relations would play well to the frenzied Twitterati in the wake of the Bell Pottinger scandal? Or whether he felt the complexities, nuances and scruples surrounding shaping perceptions would be too difficult to communicate or too boring to make it to print?

His facade slipped with “... public relations companies are mercenaries in the realm of discourse and fake news. They invented fake news as well as fake concepts such as brands and logos and all the lies that ad companies spout …“. It is a binary Bell Pottinger that would’ve been proud of. Perhaps the irony is lost on him.

What we most certainly don’t need any more of is agenda-driven hot air. We need a conversation about how governments should communicate, not whether they should. We need to talk about transparency and whether government consultants ought to be required to make their efforts public.

We also need to keep up with the world where fields like behavioural economics have the capacity for making societies better or — in nefarious hands — the capacity to manipulate entire countries.

And we need to start from the principle that the people of SA deserve to be told, regularly, what their taxes and their votes have bought them. That is the very essence of the social contract.

Nick Clelland CEO, Resolve Communications