Brendan Cooper – your friendly social media-savvy freelance copywriter and social media consultant. Or: words make ideas make money.

Lionel Zetter today writes about the “disappointing” result of the vote at the PR Week debate over whether PRs have a duty to tell the truth. The ‘truth’ motion was defeated by 138 votes to 124.

The vote surprises me. Far from the romantic vision of PR practitioners being compulsive spinners playing fast and loose with ‘the truth’, they are a fairly conservative bunch who know that one step in the wrong direction and they’re mincemeat. No one wants a ‘good day to bury bad news’ episode. No one wants a Sony PSP flog.

So PR really is about ‘the truth’. Or, perhaps more realistically, ‘a truth’. It’s the job of the practitioner to elevate the client message , and at the end of the day this purely represents a point of view that the client pushes into the public domain. What’s wrong with that?