The illusion of control

Control - the power to influence or direct people's behavior or course of events. This is somewhat contradictory. You cannot use the word influence to define control. To me, control is near absolute while influence has some flexibility.

I live in the PR world where big headed practitioners believe they can control the media. What a sad joke of an illusion that is. You cannot control the media, you can only feed it. The skill comes in your cooking, adding the correct ingredients and making sure it suits the taste of the person/publication/website that is doing the eating. A really good chef knows exactly what his customers tastes are and how they like their food served - if he doesn't he will lose his customers.

My advise is to drop the act and face the truth that your job is not to control the media but to influence it. If you get the recipe right and your influence is reflected in the media then you have done your job well. Any media outlet that succumbs to control is no longer an independent and reliable source of information and disqualifies itself as a worthy medium for your clients.

PR can be an honourable profession as long as you apply respect to all the facets of what you do and drop the act - you're good but you can't control it!