Can one distinguish public relations activities from biased journalism?

Bibliogr. s. 190

A play between politicians and journalists takes place on several levels, from basic services of press spokespersons, through a competition for attention, up to sophisticated techniques of spin and counter-spin. Politicians taking advice of public relations specialists and journalists form a common environment. Therefore a disturbing question arises, if one can tell the cases of biased, engaged journalism from the cases of biased, engaged public relations activities? A formal selection criterion seems to be quite simple: public relations specialists are subordinated to the management of an organization while journalists are free from such obligations. In this article an additional criterion was applied: public relations models by Grunig and Hunt were compared to models of journalism, which are based on different levels of influencing receivers. Publications of two Polish weeklies of opinion from the fourth quarter of 2012 were examined. The method of research was content analysis.