Jason Horowitz offers wry coverage of PR Week's annual awards banquet in the New York Observer . It's an entertaining read; what we love most is Jason's seeming wonderment that people actually give awards for PR. Like a visitor from another planet, he reports:

Winners jumped out of their chairs, hugged their partners and waved white cloth napkins over their heads. After each winner was announced, stereos played electric-guitar chords and a strobe light flecked the pearly white smiles in violet and silver. Onstage, statuesque women handed out heavy statuettes in the shape of the letters P and R.

Frankly, we've always wondered about those PR awards, too...

Nonetheless, the most interesting parts of Jason's piece are the provocative quotes from Richard Edelman. Excerpt:

"In a world where we don't have a belief in a single source, you don't have a Walter Cronkite anymore. P.R. is the discipline on the rise," said Richard W. Edelman, president and chief executive of the public-relations firm Edelman.

"P.R.," he said, "plays much better in a world that lacks trust." ...

"It used to be I would schmooze you and I was your flack," said Mr. Edelman, whose firm netted about $260 million in 2005. "Today, if we want to get a message into the public's conversation, we just make a post on a blog. If The Wall Street Journal goes after a client, we don't have to accept that anymore. Let's post the documents we gave The Journal; let's show the interviews the newspaper decided not to show.

"You're not God anymore," he said.

Take that, you arrogant media types! Yeah, that's right! That's right! We bad!

Um...by the way, we have this great idea for a story...

(Via Romenesko)

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