"All of the MOD PR/CM people I’ve met strike me as good people doing a very hard job trying to bridge the gap between two camps that understand little of the others needs or motivation. Could we do it better?"
You're having a laugh, surely?
All of the MOD
PR people I’ve met are, as you suggest, undoubtedly good people (Do the forces have anything else?). However,
PR is, or is often seen as, a bit of a career dead end - so they're not always the very best people especially in the most senior positions. And the job is, admittedly, not always an easy one. But it could be done very much better, very much more easily, as so many aircrew who do not have a formal
PR remit demonstrate so effortlessly. When allowed to do so, most squadron and station commanders, to say nothing of the one stars and above, prove to be excellent positive communicators, and the
PR folk inevitable serve only to get in the way and to hinder mutual understanding.
What the media need is not that hard to understand, and with the most cursory training, it ought to be possible for the dimmest
PR officer to get their head around it! Nor is it that hard for a journo to understand the needs and motivation of our servicemen.
So why is service
PR so badly broken?
The culture of MoD
PR is wrong, for a start.
The purpose of the organisation should be to promote positive coverage and to enhance understanding of the military, and not to function as another arm of the political (New Labour now, but it was almost as bad before) spin machine.
It would be easy to blame the shift from uniformed leadership of the
PR empire to Civil Servant, but with a few notable exceptions, the service DPRs/DCCs weren't much better.
No-one has any real problem with information being witheld in order to safeguard military security, but too often, the driver is the avoidance of political embarrassment, and in a democracy, that's not on.
When asked a question, the reaction should be to ask oneself "How can I help this person? How can I give him the most comprehensive and helpful answer to his question, as quickly as possible." and not: "How can I avoid answering this question? How can I avoid, evade and obstruct, and how long do I need to do that to make the question go away."
When asked a question, perhaps the sensible PRO would assess whether the questioner is broadly sympathetic (and thus more likely to be sympathetic, or even helpful) or hostile. The MoD has always seemed to prefer a couple of worthless column inches in a red top to a couple of paragraphs in (say) Flight. It has never seemed able to grasp who are its friends in the media, and who are its enemies.
Treating all media enquiries in an adversarial fashion only guarantees that relationships will become more adversarial.
As a result, most journos would agree that approaching DCC (RAF) or
PR STC for help is the very last option, because it's so unlikely to yield a helpful result (or indeed any result at all in a meaningful timescale), and that circumventing the proper procedure (or even filing an FoI request) is far more effective.
"Could we do it better?"
It's hard to imagine how you could do it much worse. Certainly in my more than 20 years as a 'customer', it has never been worse than it is now.