Beware PR men bearing dictators' gifts

From Hungary to Kazakhstan and Putin's Russia, despots see the British as the masters of the black art of spin.

Press officers for the alarmingly rightwing Hungarian government were touring London last week. No one they met knew whether to bellow with rage or laugh them to scorn. Project Associates, a PR outfit, wanted journalists, government and charities to give a hearing to one Zoltán Balog, who bears the warm title of minister for social inclusion. He wants, they said, to tell the world how Hungary plans "to expand healthcare and community initiatives" for its Roma and guarantee them "political representation".

In the age of the internet, the spin appears futile, ridiculous even. Anyone who wants to know can discover that the revival of the right in Hungary has brought a revival of the hatreds of the fascist movements of the 1930s and 1940s. I am not saying that Viktor Orbán's government is a modern Iron Guard. But equally, I don't doubt that when historians write about how the financial crisis unleashed the prejudices of European extremism, they will begin in Hungary and describe how antisemitism, attacks on press freedom and, above all, the hounding of Roma returned as if nothing had changed and nothing had been learned. The record is clear. Far-right groups have driven Roma from their homes, attacked and, on occasion, murdered them.

But perhaps Mr Balog is not such a fool. Along with financial services, the PR racket is one of the few growing industries in Britain. (Say what you must about our decline, we remain world leaders at manipulating money and information.) The Hungarian government is not alone in thinking it can use British talent to polish its image. Putin's Russia and the Kazakhstan dictatorship employed the services of Portland Communications, set up by Tim Allan, a former aide to Tony Blair.

After he landed the Kazakhstan contract, he had the pleasure of seeing his old master make a promotional video for the dictatorship. In the last decade, I argued that Blair should wear his enemies' charge that he was a "neocon" with some pride. Wanting to spread democracy was not such a crime. But that was then. Now Blair hymns the achievements of the Kazakh dictatorship, whose police arrest citizens for the crime of insulting the president, torture opposition activists and shoot striking oil workers.

The only mystery about the regime is why did it bother to employ Portland? Why, for that matter, do the Belarusian and Azerbaijani tyrannies join Hungary, Russia and Kazakhstan in wasting money on western image-makers?

The answer challenges the notion that the net guarantees accountability. It is not just Utopian geeks who believe it. Gordon Brown and Hillary Clinton, leathery brutes who lost whatever idealism they possessed before Microsoft had invented its first operating system, were vocal in deploying the line that dictatorships will not be able to compete in a world where economic success depends on the free flow of information.

Sitting in newspaper offices, where I can almost see the money haemorrhaging out the doors, the future they envisage does not look so cheery. As the net destroys media business plans, foreign reporting on countries such as Hungary, Russia and Kazakhstan becomes ever harder to fund.

Instead of living in a new age of transparency, governments and corporations are enjoying a media world defined by a growing inequality of arms. The Public Relations Consultants Association told me that its best guess was that Britain had about 60,000 press officers. The Newspaper Society estimates that there are about 40,000 journalists "but that figure includes people no one would think of as reporters". The number who can hold power to account is far smaller. The Newspaper Society says 10,000 work on local and regional papers. In a study of Fleet Street published last year, Women in Journalism put the number of editors and reporters on the national press at 3,800.

Broadcasters cannot come to the rescue. As part of the deal with Rupert Murdoch, the Conservatives slashed the BBC's budgets. Its managers have responded by hacking back quality journalism rather than the pap. You can pick holes in these figures – what about freelancers writing for newspaper websites? – but the uncomfortable fact remains that growing numbers of PRs are giving material to a diminishing band of reporters desperate to fill empty space with whatever puffery lands in their inboxes.

The Panglossian wisdom is that the web allows access to new sources of information and blogs, tweeters and online journals will replace the old newsrooms. But the pinpricks tiny sites can inflict on a target do not begin to match the cudgel blows the mass media of the 20th century could deliver. Of course, an oligarch or leader of a dictatorial regime would prefer that no criticism appeared anywhere. But he can rest easy if the criticisms are hidden in obscure corners of the web and do not enter the mainstream. The PR with the resources of a state or oligarch behind him is there to maintain a cordon sanitaire.

"Public relations firms are far keener on defending clients than the diplomats, who used to put their countries' cases," said Michael Harris from Index on Censorship. "If the regime falls, diplomats see no need to worry. In all likelihood, they will hang on to their jobs. But PRs know that if they don't deliver, they will lose their contract."

To make life easier for them, Britain has no equivalent of America's Foreign Agents Registration Act, which forces governments to disclose the names of the propagandists they are employing and how much they are paying them.

In propaganda, as in so much else, money matters. Azerbaijan, one of Asia's most corrupt countries, sees it as a worthwhile investment to spend £3,500 a head on putting up British politicians in luxurious hotels. No human rights group can begin to match those resources. Even when the wealthier Council of Europe tried to send a German politician to examine the treatment of Azerbaijan's political prisoners, it found he could not stay in any hotel. The authorities refused to allow him into the country.

The public needs to develop a sceptical intelligence to deal with the decline of serious news. My rule of thumb is that if you see a commentator or politician praising a dictatorship, plutocrat or corporation, the best course is to assume that they have been got at unless they can prove otherwise.

A test will come on 10 May when Balog arrives in Britain. If you hear a minister or pundit opine that the complaints about Hungary's politicians are mere leftist hysteria, you will know what has happened.

Nick Cohen, The Observer