ABSTRACT Twenty years of research indicates that journalists hold a negative, often antagonistic, attitude toward the public relations field and public relations practitioners. The research reported herein examines how those attitudes influence print re- porters' connotative use of the terms public relations and PR in their stories. Eighty-four published examples containing the term public relations or PR were analyzed revealing seven different connotative themes or definitions: distraction, disaster, challenge, hype, merely, war, and schmooze. In over 80% of the cases, the journalist used the terms in a negatively embedded context, thus supporting recent research indicating that journalists are far from being objective in their use of linguistic descriptors.
Images of Public Relations in the Print Media. Available from: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/233002993_Images_of_Public_Relations_in_the_Print_Media [accessed Sep 14, 2015].