A story from today's Chicago Sun-Times made me remember some wisdom of Ragan's late founder, Larry Ragan.

We've all read this kind of story before:

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Cook County now spends more than $1 million for 15 salaried public relations employees.

So why is Cook County Board President Todd Stroger looking to hire an outside consultant to help handle public relations for the county hospital system?

"We're looking for expertise, to let people know what's going on," says Stroger, who's looking at proposals from nine firms. "We do good things. If you don't tell people, they won't know.''

And what about the three PR people at Stroger Hospital, the one at Provident Hospital and the one at the health department?

"Maybe they need a little help,'' says Stroger. "Is there something wrong with that? This isn't a Mickey Mouse operation. This is a large organization.''

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To laugh quite as hard as we in Chicago laughed at this item, you have to know how incredibly repulsive Cook County government is now, was during Stroger's father's long tenure as board president, and was millions of years before that, when the place was run by actual political dinosaurs. (Scientists have demonstrated that the Strogers are direct descendants from Triceratops.)

But the notion that the problem is that the county is doing a bounty of good things but their 15 PR people are hiding all that light under a bushel—this is really something.

PR people, in whatever numbers, don't transform the reputations of organizations. To my mind come words I haven't seen in a long time but that I remember by rote, simply because they are true. In a Ragan Report column from 1974, Larry Ragan wrote about Watergate, and why the best PR men government money could buy couldn't save the administration.

Larry said the PR an organization gets is, no matter how fancy PR techniques get, very much related to the PR an organization deserves.

To the Nixon administration, Larry wrote in his hard-ass style:

"Boys, you weren't good. Bad PR."