Ethics and Credibility of the Public Relations Profession

Will the public relations (PR) profession ever gain credibility and respect from the media and the general public?

Two years ago, the majority of a 350 strong audience attending a PR Week debate on Ethics agreed that lying was sometimes necessary to achieve your communication objectives.

Some people were appalled by the voting outcome, but honestly, is that not what the profession is about – selective communication? Persuasion? When you omit some information from the public, are you not lying and being dishonest to your publics?
Isn’t that what clients expect and why they value the work of PR agencies and professionals – ‘airbrushing’ the facts?

Public relations professional bodies also do not seem to help the situation, because they do not take any action against registered members who disregard their professional code of conduct.

The problem is further compounded by some PR practitioners’ unwillingness to join the professional bodies for fear of prosecution, which in actual fact never happens anyway as stated above. Professional bodies seem to more interested in making money from their training programmes and ridiculously high membership fees.

The public and the media, and even PR professionals are also getting very suspicious of organisations’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes, because organisations don’t always live up to their ideals as projected in their CSR programmes.

The question we should ask ourselves is why we continue to debate about this? Should the question really be about the PR techniques that we use and about whether we decide to disclose or not disclose information or should the debate rather focus on the interests of the organisation that we represent – whether their interests are ethical or unethical?

As a former public relations practitioner, I have learned that it is almost impossible to be truly transparent to your publics, because it is not always in the best interest of an organisation to reveal the whole truth as this could ruin the image of your organisation. Even if you do tell the truth, you tell it in a way that it does not make your company look as if it’s run by poorly trained managers.

You simply cannot bite the hands that feed you, but as a PR practitioner, you need to set a balance between representing your organisation and its publics, because you have an ethical responsibility to both parties, especially the latter.