Just gimme some truth

Friday is a suitable day for penance and thinking about the idea of truth. Good for the soul. I spent last Friday with hackademics at the ICE (Institute of Communication Ethics) Conference on Journalism, PR and the problem of truth-telling in London.

Fascinating it was, too.

Just what is the truth - and whose is it? As Trevor Morris, one of Britain's two Professors of PR, put it: 'PR is not a branch of moral philosophy!' Some speakers, however, thought it should be.

Most amusing and thought-provoking was Chris Atkins, director of the feature documentary Starsuckers, who showed how he conned the tabloid press in both an amusing way - with a fake story on Amy Winehouse setting fire to her barnet in, well, Barnet - and in a serious way - offering and getting offers from papers for the illegal private medical records of celebs, based on a fake Harley Street plastic surgery practice.

Plus, more recently and closer to home, spoofing BBC London News and the quality papers into believing there was an urban fox-hunting group based in Victoria Park, Shoreditch. The 'fox' was a dog with a fake theatrical fur coat. Laughter - but hollow laughter - at these hoaxes.

You can see Atkins in action at a recent CoJo event.

News may be entertainment in the tabloids, but is there no truth at the base?

Atkins, like Morris, argued that a new byline should appear in stories to acknowledge the increasing input of PR in them - up to 90% in some publications, according to Morris' figures.

At the end of the piece, an addendum: 'THIS STORY BASED ON PR'. Go figure that!

Truth is always the first casualty of war, as Florian Zollman and Tim Crook showed in their papers on the reporting of the US assault on Fallujah in 2004 and the similarities between the 1930s and today in the reporting of the forces of war and of appeasement. The US and British media did not come out of either smelling of roses.

Even on the internet, there's no permanency to truth. Murray Dick, latterly of the Centre for Investigative Journalism at City University, alerted us to the concept of 'unpublishing' - where stories on newspaper websites are altered or even removed ex post facto when found to be wrong or dangerous legally. How long does truth last? It withers on the cyberspace vine.

All hacks aspire to tell 'the truth', but do we really know what is and how to get to it? Do we need lessons in moral philosophy? Should there be a tab on this website called 'Truth-telling'? Discuss.

We did.

John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University; Chairman of the ICE (the Institute of Communication Ethics); and on the editorial board of its journal, Ethical Space.