Bulgarian PR Expert Maxim Behar: Freedom of Speech Is the Mother of All Freedoms

Media must be completely independent because freedom of speech is the mother of all freedoms in a modern democracy, according to Bulgarian PR expert Maxim Behar.

“The world changed two to three years ago with the so-called tsunami of social media. The clients of PR agencies now come to us to ask us how to use their media, not how to reach the media. Because they now have media of their own — whether that is their Facebook page, or a LinkedIn page, or their website, they already got their media,” Behar told the BGNES news agency in an interview.

He says there are two essential words in his field and business — “public” and “relations’.

“Our major power used to be that we could make publicly known people who weren’t. That’s no longer in demand. First of all, because everybody is a public personality, a regular person sitting in an old garage with a 10-year-old laptop could become more famous than a politician, a sports personality, or a show business star. That is, publicity is already very different. This is the first big change,” Behar thinks.

In his words, the second significant change has materialized in journalism itself.

“If we assume that there are 1 billion users of Facebook, this means that there are 1 billion journalists worldwide. What other than journalism is writing on your wall or commenting on interesting topics?” asks the Bulgarian PR expert.

“Modern journalism — except analyses — although sometimes one can find profound analysis on Facebook walls — boils down to having something to say and having somewhere to say it. Social media are providing people with a platform on which they exercise in journalism, and are becoming better and better,” he believes, while also pointing out that, on the other hand, traditional media are disappearing.

“I am sorry to say that again, many of my friends get angry with me because I was in the newspaper business for twenty years — but traditionally, media are disappearing irreversibly. At the end of the day, the journalists writing for a newspaper do not trade in the paper; they are traders of ideas, commentaries, and viewpoints. They should be pleased that traditional media are disappearing and that those are being replaced by online media, which are faster. Online media, however, have a different language because the newspaper language is not the language of the Internet. The language of a news agency is not the language we use to communicate on Facebook, and it is not the language that we use on Skype. And the language we use on Skype is not the language we use for SMS Text Messages. These are all entirely different languages in their essence. I think these are the major changes in our business,” Behar explains.

He believes that these transformations have yet to be brought about by the economic crisis or the fact a client who used to have a budget of 100 now has a budget of 50.

“I am no longer calling a crisis what’s been happening around us. This is a new reality. It was a crisis in the initial years — 2008–2009. It is now a new reality in which we will live for many years,” the PR expert predicts.

“But if somebody tears a newspaper to pieces publicly (Behar refers to a recent case in Bulgaria in which TV7 anchor Nikolay Barekov tore to pieces an issue of the Trud daily on air as part of the war between the owners of the two media — editor’s note), then this too is a crisis for both the newspaper owners and for the entire society. There are other ways of being in a dispute that are much more convincing, intelligent, and not so aggressive. We know very well that aggression generates aggression, and we don’t need that in our society right now. We all witnessed how, in Russia, Vladimir Zhirinovsky poured juice on his opponent during a TV debate; we are witnessing brutal lobbyism designed to use media for corporate purposes… But I had never even imagined that somebody could strike at a print media on the TV screen… This stands for the labor of our colleagues and friends. We must appreciate and respect it, just as we must appreciate and encourage tolerance in the modern society,” Behar says.

He thinks that in political PR, things must be a little more black and white.

“You work for a mayor, a president, or a member of parliament, and if they get elected, you win; your campaign was great; if they don’t get elected, you lose. Results there are a lot more defining in terms of whether a campaign has been successful or not,” the PR expert explains.

“Every single Facebook profile of a person running for mayor, president, MP, is actually a media that this candidate owns. But nobody knows how to use and manage them because to manage media, you still need to be a bit of a journalist; you need to have a feeling for the market and know your readers and what, when, and how you should give to them. In principle, political PR, I would call it political marketing, is a very complex matter which is not for everybody,” Behar believes.

“Media should — I am saying they should — be independent because the freedom of speech is the mother of all freedoms in a modern democracy. If a politician wants to sell something interesting to the media, they should not be calling a journalist that they know; they should be sufficiently interesting and convincing and have a very interesting position and a platform so that the media can get interested in them,” he adds.

In his words, however, in a small country such as Bulgaria where “we are all cousins,” the reality is different.

“It is normal to know the journalists in a certain newspaper or a TV station and to have some dependencies with one another. But I think that ideally, the public relations business must not try to influence media in any way other than its creative force, ideas, brainwaves,” Behar states.

In his view, a PR agency’s successful strategy and good ideas attract the media and, respectively, its readers, viewers, and listeners. “This is the foundation of our business — being interesting, innovative, and knowing how to use social media.”

Behar believes that PR has yet to become a media service. He thinks that there must be a “Chinese wall” between the PR business and journalism. “There must be a perfect partnership and understanding, but there must not be any influence attempts in either direction.”

“Many people I have worked with in the press know that for these almost 20 years in the business, I never afforded to call a colleague to ask them for a favor. First, because this is contrary to any ethical norms; second, even if you turn your back on these norms, you can call once or twice, but they will hang up on you the third time. Our job is to come up with a strategy that can be so interesting for the media that they could like it and understand that it is worth writing something about the respective product,” he adds.

Behar also notes that one of his first definitions for PR that he came up with 15–16 years ago was the following brief sentence: “Creating an interesting project that can get the media interested, without any of them knowing that you created it.” His current definition is more straightforward: “The ability to do something good with everybody knowing about it.”

“This way, people are not only becoming better, they are starting to work better; there is a point in knowing what is good,” he argues.

In his words, journalists must be impartial and express their opinions. “Each journalist is a homo sapiens. They are people with opinions, a position, and the clash of many positions leads to the most valuable thing in a society — knowledge.”

“Social media are arrays of knowledge. The more often we exchange different opinions in them, and in the traditional media, the greater people’s knowledge is. The more there are different opinions and different clashes of positions, however painful they might be for our clients and for ourselves when it comes to business, the better we are getting, the more we get to know, and the more enriched we are when the media are independent. The media must be independent. Media independence is a journalist’s opinion without anybody influencing them. But these must be the opinions of these people themselves, not the opinions of their owners or opinions imposed on them by their chief editors. I am not saying that is happening but every young democracy such as Bulgaria faces this risk. There will be an independent society and independent people when there is independent journalism. We must protect this freedom, especially now that we are somewhat tired of the transition and slightly disappointed in our great expectations from the EU after 2007. Now we especially must protect media freedom as something precious, or even invaluable; I would say — the freedom of each one of us being able to say their opinion and to defend it,” Behar concludes.

Watch the video interview here.