If you have tears to shed, prepare yourself; if not, get out an onion now. The PR firm Bell Pottinger has been suspended from its trade association and will probably collapse as a result. Bell Pottinger has previously represented despots all around the world, from Chile’s Pinochet to Belarus’s Lukaschenko; it has burnished the image of Asma Assad, the wife of the Syrian dictator, and of BAE, the British arms company that became embroiled in a scandal for its dealings with Saudi Arabia (among other places). Its client list practically defined a global elite of the very rich and unsavoury – and all this only increased its allure to potential clients, until it was finally tripped up on a rotten little South African operation, working for a family who don’t even murder and torture their opponents. It really is the most awfully bad luck.

In a global perspective, the punishment of Bell Pottinger does look almost unfair. For all its boasts of being prepared to represent almost anyone but Robert Mugabe, it was not, by the standards of international lobbying companies, egregiously loathsome. Other big firms will work for the same clients and will no doubt now be scrabbling to pick up what’s left of Bell Pottinger’s business. The ethical standard of the PR industry appears to be that it is all right to defend corrupt or wicked regimes providing that you do so while using only arguments that appear respectable. Alternately, you can fight dirty on behalf of a relatively clean cause – Bell Pottinger was paid nearly half a billion dollars for its work on behalf of the US army occupying Iraq, which could have been presented as a help in the struggle against Isis. Just don’t get caught using dirty tactics for a dodgy client.

It would be silly as well as wrong to gloat too much. The urge for power and especially for the power to deceive that PR offers (perhaps deceptively) to its clients was there long before the industry and will outlast it. There is a sense in which Bell Pottinger already seems to belong to a vanished world. The PR industry no longer has the slightly sinister glamour that associated it with obvious crooks or corporates. Over the last 20 or 30 years it has taken over many of the traditional unglamorous functions of journalism and many of its methods too.

In the US there are reckoned to be nine PR practitioners for every working journalist and that proportion is unlikely to change. Most were journalists before. Many of them find themselves writing news stories just as they did before, except with more time to prepare them. Some years ago, the journalist Nick Davies estimated in his book Flat Earth News that 60% of the content of the British press was more or less undigested press releases. That proportion won’t have diminished since. There would be very little in the media of any sort without press releases, and these can include hard news carefully prepared to aid understanding as well as idiocy wrapped in fluff.

The internet is indirectly responsible because it has undermined the traditional financial basis of the media industry. But it has also had direct effects, in the rise of online persuasion. In the history of propaganda and advertising techniques it has as often been politics and religion that have driven progress as much as commerce. As the American academic Tim Wu points out in his history of advertising, The Attention Merchants, it was the British government’s campaigns for conscription at the outbreak of the first world war that first showed the power of really large PR campaigns. Only later did private companies try to imitate them. We seem to be entering another such period now. There is nothing done by a PR company which compares in vicious effectiveness to Breitbart or the operations of the Russian government – or even, in Britain, to the more benevolent work of Momentum.