College Sports Information Directors of America

By Rob Zaleski
April 4, 2005

It is, George Beres says, hard to believe we've reached this point.

Sad truth is, however, an increasing number of Americans don't understand that public relations and journalism have absolutely nothing to do with one another.

They don't understand, he says, that a journalist's job involves getting the facts and reporting them in a straightforward, honest way. Whereas a PR person is "essentially operating in behalf of a client and uses facts selectively to paint as attractive an image as possible."

And sometimes PR people lie.

But Beres, a retired 72-year-old free-lance writer from Eugene, Ore., said in a phone interview that he can understand why the public is confused. The lines between journalism and PR are becoming more and more blurred - as we discovered again recently when it was revealed that the Bush administration was providing politically biased, taxpayer-funded videos to the nation's TV stations, many of which were being aired as routine news stories.

And how can we expect the public to know the difference, Beres asks, when the people running our universities don't seem to know? How else do you explain, he says, that most college J-schools today - including, by the way, UW-Madison - give journalism degrees to students who major in PR?

Beres - whose son Roland Beres is a newscaster for WKOW-TV/Channel 27 - wants to do something about that.

For the last few years he's been waging a one-man crusade to pressure universities into moving PR out of their J-schools and into a more appropriate program - such as business.

And while he hasn't had any success so far - most J-school deans react defensively when the subject's brought up, he says - nobody's about to question his credibility.

In 1955, Beres received a bachelor's degree from Northwestern University's highly respected Medill School of Journalism. And then he spent the next 30 years as a sports information director - or, in his words, a "PR hack" - first at Northwestern and then at the University of Oregon before retiring.

It was, for the most part, an enjoyable experience, he says. But he never felt comfortable about occasionally having "to tell little white lies."

What kind of lies?

At the behest of a coach, Beres says, he might add an inch or two to an athlete's height or 10 or 15 pounds of weight. Or sometimes he'd withhold information about a key player's injury.

But that was petty, he says.

"It's not petty when your government hires a PR firm to change its image, as corporations and politicians long have done."

Beres says he first became interested in the issue in the early 1990s after the University of Oregon - following the lead of other universities - added the word "communications" to its J-school program and began offering a PR major.

He says he understands why they did it: Incoming freshmen didn't have the same burning desire to become newspaper reporters as did their counterparts of the 1970s and '80s, following the infamous Watergate scandal.

So the school had to add other majors, such as PR and advertising, to attract new students. And PR proved an instant hit, Beres says, partly because PR jobs tend to pay considerably more than those at newspapers or TV.

So what does Jim Baughman, director of the UW-Madison's School of Journalism and Mass Communication, think of Beres' charges?

Not much.

UW-Madison, he points out, has been teaching PR since the 1940s and began offering it as a J-school major in 1970 - the same year the J-school added the words "mass communications" to its title.

"We are a public university, and there is a greater expectation that our professional mission will include real jobs beyond just journalism and broadcast journalism," he says.

Baughman groans when told that Beres believes PR would be a better fit in the school of business.

"Those people couldn't write a letter to the milkman - and you can quote me," he says.

"I mean, if you want a PR practitioner to be effective, he or she has to be able to write and communicate clearly and have some sense of history. You're not going to find that in another program."

Beres, for his part, says he looks forward to the day when J-schools make investigative reporting their primary focus again. And there's never been a greater opportunity than now, he says, with the Bush Administration's obsession with secrecy and its attempts to limit access to government records.

"I'm convinced that if J-schools did that, you'd see high school seniors get motivated and excited to go into journalism again."

Most young people, he notes, have never even heard the word muckracker.

"They need to know it's an honorable term."

E-mail: rzaleski@madison.com

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