Public relations practitioners increasingly are using the Internet as a channel to get information into the hands of its audiences. This process bypasses traditional media. That’s great because we don’t have to worry about how traditional news media will filter our messages. It’s also troublesome because we can no longer rely on traditional news media to screen our content for accuracy.

According to Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman Public Relations Worldwide, this means the PR profession needs to start behaving more like journalists. In an interview in Canada’s Globe and Mail, Edelman said, “If we’re just putting stuff up [on the Internet] and people are reading it and accepting it as truth, then we should have a journalist-level quality as our objective instead of a promoter objective.”

My degree is in journalism and I was a newspaper reporter in the mid-1970’s for a brief time before moving into corporate communications. Despite two years in the newspaper game compared to nearly 30 in corporate communications, the notions of accuracy and fact-checking have always been an inherent part of my approach to my work. I have to wonder, though, about the agencies reaping massive billable hours from government agencies to produce VNRs and getting small TV news outlets to air them as unattributed news reports. How quickly will these agencies embrace the ideal that their first responsibility is to the truth?

Edelman has the right idea. Theonly question is how to spread the religion through the profession.