must have sources

From Lee, Mordecai, Grant Neeley and Kendra Stewart. 2012. The

Practice of Government Public Relations. Boca Raton:CRC Press.

Government Public Relations: What Is It Good For? 14

from the news media, reporting to the electorate on agency activities, and generally being responsive to the public. These are not luxuries in the context of democratic governance. Rather, they are obligations that can’t be ignored, even if and when a politician denounces them as self-serving and wasteful propaganda. The qualitative difference between public administration and business administration is the governmental context of agency management. In a democracy, public administrators must engage in certain activities that are expected as the sine qua non of government. For example, government managers must respond to inquiries from the news media, whether the particular issue would put the agency in a good light or a bad one. Similarly, given the central role of public opinion in a democracy, public administrators have a duty to report to the citizenry on the work of the agency and its stewardship of taxpayer funds. Again, these are part of the rubric of public relations. Hence, when focusing on these purposes, public relations is integral to public administration, not ancillary to it.

1. Media Relations

The link between public administration and media relations is practically a tautology. Government managers are public servants. They are accountable to the public, not quite like elected officials, but accountable nonetheless. One way that the accountability is operationalized is by the obligation of public administrators to work, transparently including the duty to respond to media questions, inquiries, and requests. “No comment” is not an acceptable answer from a civil servant whose salary is being paid by the taxpayers. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is chock full of rights that inure to each individual American citizen: speech, assembly, religion, petitioning government, and so on. Only one clause in the amendment grants a right to an institution: freedom of the press to what we now call the news media. Why the selectivity? In the eyes of the founders, journalism had to be independent of government so that citizens in a democracy could obtain information about what government and elected officials were doing from sources other than the government and elected officials themselves. In that framework, the news media was an instrument of democracy, serving as the feedback loop of the democratic process. So, the tautology is that government agencies engage in media relations because government agencies in a democracy have the obligation to cooperate with the news media. However, government-media relations tend to be stormy. Besides a built-in skepticism about “official sources” that is part of journalistic culture, there are several factors that specifically contribute to the difficult of a public administrator having consistently good relations with the media. These factors include the following:

 The negative image of the bureaucrat in pop culture and public opinion  The profit-making motives of the media