Awful PR for the Public Relations Society of America

In response to the above comment titled "PRSA Responds" by Arthur Yann (above), Jack O'Dwyer submits the following:
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My hat’s off to PR Watch for touching off this much-needed public discussion of PRSA practices.

Let’s take the most important parts of Mr. Yann’s letter first which deal with my claims that the Society keeps vital information from members, lacks democracy, and disregards basic Robert’s Rules while citing Robert’s as its parliamentary authority.

If the Society is so democratic, why was there a “Committee for a Democratic PRSA” last year that obtained 305 signatures on a petition and got 150 others who declined to reveal their names.

Heading the Committee were Richard Edelman, head of the world’s largest PR firm, and Art Stevens, former president of the New York chapter and holder of the Society’s coveted “Patrick Jackson Award” for outstanding service to the Society.

Basic democratic principles are that the electorate knows who their representatives are, what they say, and how they vote. This is not true at the Society where there is no published list of the nearly 300 Assembly delegates when there used to be.

Delegates are not even required to put their names on this list which is available only to other delegates and then only several weeks before the Assembly. Members may know their own chapter delegates but they also have to know all the delegates in case they want to express an opinion to them.

Members Need Voting Records

Members have a right to know how their delegates vote but the last time that happened was in 2004 when there was a roll call vote.

The Society says all members can go to the Assembly but it refuses to audiocast the Assembly which would be cheap and easy.

A transcript of the Assembly, in effect a “slow-motion replay of the Assembly,” had been available every year until 2005. It allowed reporters, PR professors, students of PR, members and others to carefully study what was said. It only cost about $1,000 to prepare. Refusing to supply this is a massive loss of information to the members.

Members, including PR professors, have asked for a PDF of the members’ directory which is useful both for them and students. A PDF would be cheap and easy to do. The Society, whose members bombard reporters with releases by every known means, wants to protect its members from being bombarded with sales pitches. In other words, members can dish it out but can’t take it. This is an absurd line of reasoning.

The Society is ignoring two instances of physical threats to me including one that was witnessed by a group of delegates including a national director, as an e-mail from Yann to me pointed out. There is no disputing that I was threatened with bodily harm. A director and probably Yann himself knows who this person is. So far the Society is refusing to investigate this but instead hurls one charge after another against me.

As for O’Dwyer reporters allegedly not covering some of the 2009 conference, we wrote a lengthy article about the discussion between Arianna Huffington and Wendell Potter.

No PRSA Rules Were Broken at Assembly

I did not break any of the rules for us at the 2010 Assembly since I was warned that doing that would result in O’Dwyer reporters being forever banned from the Assembly. I did not conduct an interview during the Assembly but interviewed Art Stevens during an afternoon break. I tried to get into the Assembly lunch, which I have attended at least 35 times, but was blocked by Yann. I needed to interview delegates about the defeat of the proposal to let non-APRs run for office.

This was not a wrongdoing of mine but of the Society. It blocked a reporter in performance of his duties.

I did not know I couldn’t take pictures of the Assembly meeting room even before the Assembly began and took a couple. I stopped when warned by Yann. My tape recorder went off by accident in play mode at the Assembly. I was not recording anything.

As for the charge that I am permanently mad at the Society, it is true that I won’t give up trying to get paid for the more than 50,000 copies of O’Dwyer articles that it sold without my permission. As I have said, it took the victims of the Nazis decades to collect from World War II atrocities. The Swiss did not start repaying the victims until the 1990s. The victims never gave up and neither will I.

The German Council of PR Firms says there is no statute of limitations on wrongdoing. The Society still owes me and many other authors compensation for the massive theft of our intellectual property.

Thank you Derek for this further explanation of what went on Oct. 16 at the Assembly.

A self-characterized Flash Mob of about 20 delegates set upon me at 2:45 p.m. on Oct. 16 right in the middle of my interview with Art Stevens, leader of the Committee for a Democratic PRSA, which had just lost its bid to bring some democracy to the Society—i.e., allow non-Accredited members (81% of the members) to run for office for the first time since the mid-1970s.

This was a discourteous and rude attack. It doesn’t matter if it was deliberately planned or not. DeVries says he didn’t know who Stevens was. He should have found out.

He should have politely asked permission to have a moment with me instead of interrupting two people who were speaking.

He and the “mob” could have waited until I was finished.
Stevens gave me good quotes including saying the APR rule had to “come down just like the Berlin Wall came down.”

On top of this rudeness was cowardice since all 20 of the “mobsters” walked rapidly away while refusing to say anything.

I chased after one who said I was the victim of a “Flash Mob,” a phrase I had never heard before. Then she continued on her way.

Friends told me I was being compared to John Nash as portrayed in “A Beautiful Mind,” who was given pens by Princeton faculty members after he won a Nobel prize.

I mistakenly thought I was being honored because the “mobsters” all fled. Later I learned of the De Vries blog in which he said the pen-gifting to me actually meant that I was a “nut” like Nash who was a schizophrenic. The “Mob” told the rest of the conference to give me pens should they meet me in a hall.

This was to be conference-wide harassment of me.

Also cowardly was the verbal attack on me in front of the Washington Hilton by a delegate screaming obscenities at me and then running away when I asked a doorman to call the cops.

Derek, you say the Society has grown. It has 21,000 members today which is a gain of a little over 100 each year since 1998 when it had 19,600 members. That’s not growth. The U.S. Labor Bureau reports 240,000 “PR specialists” as of 2008.

The O’Dwyer Co., with its five excellent informational products, is a competitor to the PR Society when it shouldn’t be. The tax-free Society, under its charter and federal and state laws, is not supposed to be in competition with what any private business can do. It is the Society that thinks it’s our competitor.

It should let O’Dwyer staffers join and have full access to all member records which were created with tax-free money. The membership list belongs to the public. Society members bombard the press by every known means and it should be open season on them also.

The Society owes the O’Dwyer Co. many thousands of dollars because it sold more than 50,000 copies of O’Dwyer articles without our permission. The three-year limit on launching a lawsuit on this has expired but the moral debt remains.

The Society could start repaying this and also informing its members of our informational products by providing the O’Dwyer Co. free ad space in all its publications and on its website. It is depriving its members of knowledge they should have.

The group’s logic escapes me. I’m credentialed for the Assembly but not for the conference where an attempt was made to charge me $1,275, the rate for PR people. That’s totally contradictory.