Today’s Guardian contains an interesting article about the controversy
surrounding Maryanne Demasi and her suspension from the ABC’s *Catalyst*
program.
See
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/12/criticism-of-catalyst-misses-the-point-no-journalist-should-be-in-thrall-to-mainstream-opinion
.
Though technical communicators aren’t at all like journalists, I was struck
by his remarks describing the blurring of the distinction between science
journalists and science PR people. He says that both are often lumped under
the term “scientific communicators”. This reminds me that we seem to be
having a similar blurring of the distinction between technical
communicators and the PR people who act as “spin doctors” for companies and
government departments and are generally labelled just “communicators”.
I’d be interested to know if anyone here has felt under pressure to produce
“spin” material for their employers or clients, or even just play down
descriptions of areas where a product displays less than optimal behaviour
(a diplomatic euphemism meaning “doesn’t work properly”). I have been
documenting how to use a commercial software product supplied to the
department I’m now working for and have seen how this might operate if
things were a bit different. The supplying company produced a new version
of the product with new dialog boxes featuring a trendy black background.
Unfortunately they forgot to change the colour of the label text and some
of it became invisible. Amazingly, we’re still using it. So in my
documentation I explained what had happened and doctored my screen shots so
that the text was readable and the user could refer to the screen shot to
find how to use it. But I wondered if I could have done that if I’d been
working for the supplying company rather than for the department they’re
supplying. I also remember occasions when working with software developers
who quietly admit that a certain feature didn’t work quite as well as it
should (again meaning “doesn’t work properly”) and ask me not to say too
much about them.
Of course, we are also sometimes asked to produce marketing brochures
describing products and these are bordering on PR, but I’d be reluctant to
do them if I thought the product was shonky.
Regards
Howard
