Depending on who you believe, public relations practitioners are either integral communicators trying to get the truth out on behalf of their clients or they’re paid flacks ­ and they’re going straight to hell.

‘There’s a special rung in hell for people who pave the way for people with power,’ said Globe and Mail columnist Rick Salutin at an American Marketing Association roundtable late last month. He was referring to pr practitioners and it wasn’t the first time Salutin has taken a shot at the profession.

In fact, he devoted an entire column to the theme ‘Public Relations is the sewer of the media’ last fall at the apex of the Starbucks fiasco. (The u.s. company was on the receiving end of some very bad publicity when a Toronto community discovered Starbucks was planning on displacing a local cafe.)

The pr side clearly intended to use the roundtable to set the record straight.

Indeed, the topic, ‘Is Public Relations Blurring the Line Between Truth and Fantasy?’ was pretty well abandoned by the pr participants ­ David Weiner, partner for National Public Relations, Jane Langdon, president of Langdon Starr Public Relations and Glenn Pothier, president of the Canadian Public Relations Society ­ in favor of defending the industry against what they perceived as unfair criticism by journalists, particularly Salutin.

‘On a bad day, if some pr people are flacks, then on the same day, some journalists are hacks,’ stated National’s Weiner, who blamed the problem partly on a dumbed-down public that insists on entertainment over content.

Weiner said that no one seems to complain when a special interest group, such as the anti-smoking lobby or the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, uses pr tactics to get its message across. He added that no group has a monopoly on integrity and expertise.

Salutin said he d’esn’t think there’s a huge, unbridgeable gap between journalism and pr. He said he has a problem with the fact that pr is bought ­ primarily by people in power interested in maintaining their power. He also said that journalists tend to side with power as well ­ except, unlike pr practitioners, they’re not paid to do just that.

However, the roundtable participants weren’t interested in discussing their colleagues’ role in the distribution of power in Canada. Rather, they commiserated over what they saw as an unfair attack on their profession as of late.

Langdon, whose firm worked with Starbucks, said she was shocked at the cynicism and skepticism on the part of journalists when it came to the Starbucks situation. She said one journalist with whom she spoke rejected a positive news story on Starbucks out of hand. Langdon, who refused to name the journalist, was incredulous over what she considered an absolute unwillingness to look at both sides of the story. ‘Where is the spin coming from and where d’es it end?’ she asked.

Meanwhile, Toronto Star journalist David Israelson, who worked as a communications consultant overseas and wrote a story about the Starbucks pr team (‘Business booming for spin doctors’) that Salutin called ‘pr disguised as journalism’, said that, unlike Salutin, he has no problem with the fact that pr is paid for because individuals and companies unable to afford the aid of a pr firm can still contact the media directly. (He also said he didn’t write the headline for the Starbucks story).

Pothier, meanwhile, said that his colleagues have a responsibility to resist patting a peer on the back for a job well done if they manage to over-hype something and essentially ‘pull one over’ on a journalist. He says this style of communication can only hurt the profession.