Jack O'Dwyer is an old reporter who has been covering the PR industry in his own personal publication for about a million years now. He's generally seen as a cranky but tolerable fixture of the PR journalism scene.

Jack O'Dwyer's pet topic is how terrible industry group PRSA is. This is good, because it means at least one person in the media cares about what PRSA is doing. But apparently PRSA itself got a little peeved by Jack's latest attack: Alex Bruell reports that they're publicly accusing O'Dwyer of phone hacking. Wow! Quite an allegation, what with the current scandal and all. Here's the specific charge, from their statement:

Mr. O'Dwyer, while a free press is essential to our country, principles and profession, not everything-or everyone-wrapped in the mantle of "journalism" is right or ethical, as the News of the World scandal demonstrates. But then again, it would appear that your organization condones such practices, given that records from our teleconferencing vendor show that telephone numbers registered to the J.R. O'Dwyer Company connected to PRSA teleconference calls without PRSA's permission five times between May 22, 2007, and May 12, 2009.

Ummmm.... hmm. While there's absolutely no doubt that Jack O'Dwyer is a bit of a crank, there's also no doubt that very publicly linking a journalist with the worst phone hacking scandal in journalism history just because he allegedly listened to your boring conference calls without express written permission is O'Dwyer-level bombast. The two sides deserve one another!

Everyone else will now return to ignoring them both.

[Ad Age. Photo: Shutterstock]