Like many of you, I spend the first half hour of each day trudging through voicemails and e-mails, deleting most of them without replying. It is not only the spam that goes; so do the messages from public relations consultants trying to persuade me to write about their clients.

I do not consign the consultants' please to the digital dustbin without a prickle of guilt. The consultants are, for the most part, decent people trying to do their jobs. It is just that there are too many of them. To answer them all, or even read their messages to the end, would leave me no time to do my job, which is writing columns and articles. It would also leave no time for emailing those who do deserve replies – the readers who comment on my work without adding the dreaded words “I have a client…”

Decent as they are, many of the PR consultants are, in any event, not up to scratch. Some of the older practitioners return the compliment, complaining that financial journalists are not what they were, that they no longer research the companies they write about. They should look at some of their own staff. I recently received a call from one of the UK's leading PR outfits asking if FT wrote about business education. Why companies pay for this standard of work is a mystery.

But there are PR people whose messages I read with greater attention. These are the in-house communications staff, who are company employees rather than outside consultants. They know their organisations inside-out, have daily contact with everyone from the chief executive to the front receptionist and, being on salaries rather than annual contracts, are more interested in explaining their companies than desperately pitching stories.

I have known dozens of in-house PR people over the years and have invariably found them good value. What is noticeable, however, is how worn out and dispirited they are. It is not just the constant crises, late-night calls and inaccurate reports that get to them. It is that the people at the top of the company do not listen. I have watched in-house PR people flinch as their chief executives put their feet I it. And I have heard company spokesman and woman despair, off the record, at the trouble they saw coming that the board refused to recognise.

Of course, in-house PR people can be caught off balance too. Even they can miss what is happening in the company. But when they do, they have the knowledge and contacts to get to the root of the problem far more quickly than an outsider could.

In the October issue of the Harvard Business Review*, Dick Martin, former PR chief at AT&T, recounts a low moment. An article in an employee magazine fell through just before press time and a quiz on the company's international operations was put in its place. A cartoon was hurriedly commissioned from an outside design studio, a production manager received a blurred fax and approved it, and the magazine was printed.

As soon as the first copies arrived, the company knew it was in trouble. The cartoon showed figures telephoning around the world, such as a man with a beret in Europe – and a monkey in Africa. The company issued a lavish apology before the magazine reached people's homes and waited for the storm, which duly broke.

The company was a pioneer in purchasing from black-owned companies and the response from these was more in sorrow than in anger. The surprise for AT&T was how little support it received from its African-American staff. The cartoon, Mr Martin says, “ignited fumes of discontent over the small number of minority group members who had moved into the higher ranks of management”. It was only when the company addressed this that the furore subsided.

When mishaps such as these occur, most journalists would prefer to deal with an in-house person. You get more detail and inside knowledge. But it is not only journalists that PR people deal with today. There are investors and analysts, anti-sweatshop campaigners, corporate governance activists and employees. There have never been so many holes for companies to tumble into.

“I was surprised that people didn't tell us”, Rupert Murdoch said last week after being forced to withdraw a share options package for News Corporation executives after Australian shareholders objected to it.

Chief executives have never been in greater need of someone to tell them how they look to the world, but most company PR people do not have the clout. A survey of PR directors at 28 of the UK's top companies, including BP, Vodafone and HSBC, found that, while most reported directly to the chief executive, many failed to get the attention of the board. This survey by Watson Helsby, a headhunter in this field , found that only 30 per cent of the PR people sat on their company executive committees and none on the board.

Ah, say the external consultants, this is where we come in. We are not the chief executives' subordinates; we can talk to them frankly. The consultants may not be subordinates but they are supplicants, dependent on their next contract from the company. And one cannot help noticing that Michael Green, head of Carlton, the UK media company, who has been involved in a ferocious, and ultimately unsuccessful, fight with shareholders, was advised by some of the biggest names in the PR consulting business.

Consultants may be able to tell the odd unpalatable truth but they are never going to have the sweeping knowledge of the company's business and its stakeholders that a veteran insider accumulates. Several in-house PR heads told the survey their companies saw their jobs as soft, because what they did was unmeasurable. It is, but so is the cost of getting pay packaged and foreign factory conditions wrong. The survey found that companies had lost faith with many outside PR advisors. It is time they put their insiders where managers can listen to them.

* Gilded AND Gelded: Hard-Won Lessons from the PR Wars.