PR and its darker usage

Subject: PR and its darker usage.

Well there's been no flash of light in the sky this morning, although it's still dark and it's early.
Instead the radio burst into life with the less alarming news that Bell Pottinger the PR company was in hot water for stirring up racially motivated inaccurate news regarding white owned businesses in South Africa contributing to the disharmony in South Africa.

The PR firm had been hired by the Gupta family to take the heat off them in their dealings with President Zuma and their successful takeover of a number of strategic economic industries with, it is suggested, the help of President Zuma.

A complaint made by the Democratic Party was upheld and the PR company was accused of setting out to stir up trouble between the White section of the population and the Black by drawing attention to the disparity between the races which manifests itself in the wealth held by successful white owned companies.

The truth or untruth was not at stake, rather the fact that the company manufactured its story to highlight the race aspect of the imbalance in the country.

In some ways it's quite surprising that this inequality should make the news since in his efforts to find a harmony between the races President Mandela went out of his way to keep the economic machinery together in the knowledge that he needed a prosperous South Africa to provide money for African upliftment and reconciliation.
The racial claim in a country swamped in the racialism of Apartheid and then the Black empowerment of the ANC is a bit like "the pot calling the kettle black" in that it is endemic. What is surprising is the blatant use of a powerful PR firm to develop media stories about a situation that hardly needs emphasising and more importantly the use of manufactured false news to insight the masses and take their minds off the illegal activities of the Gupta family and more importantly, President Zuma.
I have never thought of PR in this way. Used as an destabilising device it's glossy stories used for political intrigue. But then I began to think of the stories written each day in the main newspapers over here which are based on untruths merely to destabilise the public here. "It was the Sun wot won it" was a famous headline quote in the Sun newspaper. It referred to the Conservative Parties victory in the 1992 general election and referred to the influence Rupert Murdock had played in that victory. The Sun had been relentless in its drive to turn voters against the Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock.
The power of the press and PR campaigns to influence people in their democratic right to be told, through fair and balanced reporting, some semblance of the truth seems a million light years away from the "false news" of today.
And yet when a woman parliamentarian gets to her feet and describes Pakistani men as being the perpetrators of the gang molestation of young white girls in the town she represented, Rotherham, even though the law courts are dealing with years of a civic authority  'looking the other way' for fear of racial incitement, she was fired from her job on the front bench of the Labour Party by its leader for being too inclusive in her term"Pakistani men".  Whilst not inclusive of men from Pakistan she was correct in the term since it was a racially abusive act carried out wholly by Pakistani men who acted in gangs combing the streets for white girls on the proposition that they were sexually easy and in someway available in a way Pakistani girls were not.
The complexity of double standards makes all fear for our sanity. The rules governing a deliberate mismanagement of the truth by a PR firm is ok,  the apparently justified statement of an MP, backed up by the guilty findings which unearthed that these proceedings were only the tip of an iceberg of grooming and under age sexual exploitation by Pakistani men, was vilified by her ideologically driven leader.
It's a sad sad world we live in.