There is a version of my industry that the mainstream PR world pretends does not exist. It gets discussed quietly, in private conversations between senior practitioners, and very occasionally surfaces in a scandal before being rapidly buried. It is the dark side of reputation management: the deliberate, strategic use of PR techniques not to build a reputation, but to destroy someone else’s.
Dark PR encompasses a range of practices that exist on a spectrum from aggressive-but-legal to genuinely unethical to occasionally criminal. It includes the orchestrated social media pile-on that appears organic but is coordinated. The anonymous ‘sources’ quoted in damaging stories who are actually competitors or their representatives. The leaked document that surfaces strategically to derail a rival’s product launch. The coordinated negative review campaign. The ‘neutral’ industry report produced by a consultancy with undisclosed funding from an interested party.
I am not describing things that happen rarely or only in certain markets. I am describing techniques that are in active use across corporate, political, and competitive contexts in every mature market, including India. And the people deploying them frequently have PR and communications backgrounds, because those are the people who understand how narratives are built — and therefore how they can be dismantled.
The PR industry’s silence on this is self-serving and damaging. Self-serving because naming it creates uncomfortable conversations about where the line between aggressive competitive communications and reputation sabotage actually lies. Damaging because that silence protects practitioners who cross the line and undermines the credibility of the profession as a whole.
My position is clear, even if it is not universally shared: communications professionals have an ethical obligation that exists beyond the client relationship. We have a responsibility to the broader information environment in which we operate. Techniques designed to mislead, manipulate, or deceive — regardless of how they are briefed or what objectives they serve — are not PR. They are propaganda. And the professionals who deliver them are not communications experts. They are saboteurs with media relationships.
This needs to be said publicly, by senior professionals, in industry forums. It needs to be reflected in the ethical codes of PR associations, with teeth behind those codes — not just aspirational language that nobody enforces. And it needs to be part of the conversation we have when we train the next generation of communications professionals about what this industry stands for.
We cannot claim to be trust-builders while tolerating a shadow industry built on manufactured distrust. The two positions are incompatible. And continuing to pretend the shadow doesn’t exist is no longer an option.
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