In the ethics classes and workshops we have taught, we have noticed a tendency for public relations people to address ethical issues in terms of “what works?” rather than “what’s right?” That is sometimes because it is often more difficult to figure out what ethics requires than what good public relations practice demands. Sometimes they are the same thing, and it is simply good business to behave ethically. Enlightened self-interest suggests that businesses will do well financially by doing good ethically. Developing a reputation for ethical behavior—deserved or not—can forestall government regulation; it almost certainly gives companies a competitive edge among many consumers and business people.
But sometimes what works is not right; it is just expedient and might even go unnoticed for a long period of time. It took five years for the Federal Trade Commission to take action against Legacy Learning’s bogus endorsements. And the tobacco companies used various public relations campaigns to delay regulation of cigarettes for more than two decades. In fact, many of those campaigns continue to this day, as regulation has moved from package warnings to outright bans that limit where people can smoke, and the warnings themselves are getting more graphic. These efforts are roundly criticized as a continuation of a discredited disinformation campaign. Yet, we see echoes of the tobacco industry’s campaign in soft drink company research suggesting obesity is caused by lack of exercise, not by over-consumption of sugary beverages.1
As we have suggested, many of the great financial scandals of recent years began as perfectly legal attempts to manage earnings. One might say they got out of control, but the real issue is whether anyone was ready to ask not “will it work?” but “is it right?”
Ethical Issues Can Be Difficult
To be honest, ethical issues are not easy to resolve. As we write this, a Japanese manufacturer of automobile air bags has appeared before two Congressional committees trying to explain why its products have been exploding and seriously injuring drivers. The company’s case has not been helped by the discovery that its engineers knew about the problem ten years ago but did nothing about it. Meanwhile, federal safety agencies have asked the company to declare a nationwide recall on the air bags, which have been installed in more than 8 million cars. The company, which believes the problem is related to high heat and humidity, has agreed to recall the air bags in 11 states with that kind of climate and where all the previous problems occurred. To broaden the recall to all 50 states, the company claims, would create a parts shortage that would make it more difficult to replace the air bags in the most vulnerable states. Now, this is a public relations problem wrapped in an ethical problem, wrapped in an engineering and logistics problem. Clearly, the company, the media, Congress, and the chattering class are attacking both ends. But who is tackling the core issue—what is the right thing to do?
That issue is wrapped in considerations of virtue, duty, and consequences, none of which stands alone but is in a hydraulic relationship to the others. Our goal in this book has been to equip public relations people with the essential elements of ethical theory so they can function effectively as counselors and as practitioners.
As members of senior management, public relations leaders increasingly have a voice in the development of business strategy and policies. This will almost inevitably touch on ethical issues, from the safety and social impacts of a company’s products to the fairness and care with which it conducts its affairs. And the scope of that ethical inquiry will range far beyond the company’s formal borders into its chain of suppliers and dealers.
In addition, public relations leaders are responsible for the ethical conduct of their own organizations across functions such as media relations, employee communications, speechwriting, community relations, social media, investor relations, marketing communications, and so forth. And they are responsible for the ongoing management of stakeholder relationships, ideally through open and candid dialog capable of surfacing, addressing, and resolving issues before they become an ethical dilemma.
In both roles, as counselor and practitioner, we hope public relations people look at ethical behavior not only as the avoidance of doing wrong. But also as actually doing good. Scholars like James Grunig (e.g., Grunig and White, 1992) and Shannon Bowen (2004) have suggested that the very act of establishing an open dialog between an organization and its publics makes the practice ethical. That may be so, but we do not believe it is necessary to sidestep public relations practitioners’ more prosaic work. As The New York Times columnist David Brooks once noted, “Aristotle teaches us that being a good person is not mainly about learning moral rules and following them. It is about performing social roles well—being a good parent or teacher or lawyer or friend.” To that we can add, “being a responsible company.”2 And public relations practitioners play a critical role in fulfilling that responsibility through the very exercise of their function.
An Electronic Extension
Participating in communities of interest through social media can be an electronic extension of the two-way symmetrical dialog that scholars like Grunig and Bowen consider inherently ethical. In fact, it can be a service to customers in its own right, answering their questions, advising them on everything from product usage to industry trends. Similarly, spreading the word about a product or service of genuine utility and value to consumers is ethical in itself. Bringing employees information they need to do their job and to understand a company’s role in society, as well as the state of its financial performance, shows them respect in a Kantian, as well as a common, sense. Helping senior executives express themselves accurately and truthfully in the arena of public opinion is good work in every sense of the word. Maintaining cordial and mutually supportive relationships with members of the local community recognizes both our corporate duty to care for those affected by our behavior and their right to know what we are up to. Exercising corporate responsibility through works that benefit the community and serve the common good are unquestionably ethical. All these actions are examples of what W. D. Ross would call prima facie duties of beneficence.
Is Public Relations Inherently Unethical?
So we end where we started, asking whether public relations is inherently unethical. By now, we hope our answer is obvious: there is no fundamental dichotomy between the purpose of public relations and the best ethical thinking of the last 2,500 years. Nor is it an amoral function, ethical or unethical, depending entirely on how it is used. On the contrary, public relations professionals and practitioners may never be recognized as any company’s “chief ethics officer” or even its “conscience,” but their proper role in any organization is profoundly ethical. It is to collaborate with colleagues in senior management to identify and nurture their company’s very character.
That is a particularly Aristotelian view of ethics, but it is also, in fact, how the Arthur W. Page Society defines a senior public relations leader’s role. The Society is a professional association of the world’s leading public relations people, from academia, government, and business. It is named after AT&T’s first public relations officer. (Full disclosure: one of us worked at Page’s desk for 6 years, while the other served on the society’s Board of Trustees for 24 years.)
The members of the Page Society define their job as their namesake did—more broadly than simple wordsmithing or story pitching. They even consider it more than caring for the company’s reputation, quoting Abraham Lincoln on the subject. “Character is like a tree and reputation a shadow,” Lincoln is reputed to have said. “The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”
A company’s character is manifest in everything it does, from strategy to marketing, and especially in how it serves all the people who contribute to its success and bear the cost of its failures. No public relations person—not even Arthur Page—can do that single-handedly. But the Page model calls for a company’s public relations leader to serve as a catalyst for C-suite collaboration in shaping a distinctive corporate character rooted in its values and higher purpose. As the Page White Paper puts it, “to ensure that our companies and institutions look like, sound like, think like and perform like our stated corporate character.”3
After all, as we noted at the beginning of this book, most public relations crises begin as an ethical lapse, a failing of character. Johnson & Johnson, for example, has always been a company people feel good about. Those feelings may be stimulated by all the freshly powdered babies with whom the company has carefully associated itself. Or it may reflect memories of its forthright actions 32 years ago when some still unidentified lowlife laced Tylenol capsules with cyanide, killing seven people. Whatever the reason, J&J always lands in the upper ranks of reputation surveys.
Yet, in 2013, J&J became the biggest scofflaw in the pharmaceutical industry, racking up more than $6 billion in fines and penalties to settle an array of civil and criminal charges.4 The Tylenol crisis, which cost J&J a few hundred million dollars, was the work of persons unknown. But the Department Of Justice suit, which cost orders of magnitude more, was self-inflicted. Some will argue J&J admitted to no more than a misdemeanor for misinterpreting confusing labeling rules and the biggest chunk of the fines were related to a product recall.5 In both cases, the company paid up simply to put expensive litigation behind it. That may be true. And J&J is a familiar, if not exactly good, company.
But they will have wasted their money if they do not do something about the culture that spawned these crises in the first place.
Ethical Compliance
Every major company has a senior officer who is supposed to ensure that employees comply with laws and regulations. In the spirit of all things C-suite, call him or her the Chief Compliance Officer. Usually, he or she is a lawyer, which makes practical sense—lawyers are trained in the nuts and bolts of the law, know how to interpret regulations, and can keep their work product away from prying eyes.
But compliance is not the same as ethics. Compliance is concerned with the letter of the law; ethics, with its spirit. Compliance is rooted in statutes; ethics flows from a company’s character. Compliance and ethics overlap somewhat, but not completely. J&J, for example, was under no legal obligation to take Tylenol off the shelves back in 1982; the company did so because it decided it would be unethical to expose its customers to such risk. More recently, someone at J&J apparently decided regulations did not prevent it from marketing an antipsychotic drug for off-label purposes. The Department of Justice felt differently. But the bigger question is “Was it ethical?” Did it reflect the company’s character as expressed in its famous credo that, “our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients, to mother and fathers and all other who use our products and services”?6
We believe a company’s public relations leader is best positioned to help answer questions like that. But the qualifications necessary to fulfill that role do not come with the other perks of the job. They are earned in working with colleagues across the C-suite to define and activate corporate character, not only in marketing and communications, but also across all operations and management systems.
Author David Brooks draws a distinction between what he calls “résumé virtues” (Brooks, 2015, x) and “eulogy virtues.” Résumé virtues are the skills on which we build a career—intelligence, creativity, eloquence, and so forth. Eulogy virtues are the characteristics by which we will be remembered after we die—whether we were brave, trustworthy, honest, and so forth. The eulogy virtues, he says, are “the ones that exist at the core of your being.” And their measure is “what kind of relationships you formed,” suggesting that in the practice of public relations, eulogy virtues are the best résumé virtues.
Curators of Character
As the Arthur W. Page Society sees it, public relations leaders must be “curators of corporate character,” capable of ensuring that the company’s communications and its people remain true to their core identity. And in helping to define and protect that identity, they must be “masters of data analytics” capable of building common understanding of customers, employees, investors, citizens, and other stakeholders as individuals rather than as amorphous “publics,” “target audiences,” or “demographic segments.” And they have to be “students of behavioral science” to inform and sustain an ongoing dialog with company stakeholders. But their goal is not to manipulate the beliefs, attitudes, and opinions of people outside the company; it is to shape the behavior of the company itself, consistent with its values and identity. That, it seems to us, is the essence of ethics—and the way to practice public relations without losing your soul.
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1 O’Connor, A. (2015, August 9). Coca-Cola Funds Scientists Who Shift Blame for Obesity Away From Bad Diets. The New York Times. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/coca-cola-funds-scientists-who-shift-blame-for-obesity-away-from-bad-diets/?_r=0
2 Brooks, D. (2014, December 5). Why elders smile. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/opinion/david-brooks-why-elders-smile.html?_r=0
3 Page, A.W. (2012, March 22). Building Belief: A New Model For Activating Corporate Character And Authentic Advocacy. Society See: http://www.awpagesociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Building-Belief-New-Model-for-Corp-Comms.pdf
4 J&J Is Now Top-Fined Company in the Pharma Criminal & Civil Settlement Planetary System: A Blot on Gorsky’s Leadership. (2013, November 13). Pharma Marketing Blog. http://pharmamkting.blogspot.com/2013/11/j-is-now-top-fined-company-in-dojs.html Accessed August 25, 2015.
5 The Huffington Post documented one case J&J settled in a multi-part series with links to FDA findings, court filings, and depositions. See Brill, S. (2015). America’s Most Admired Lawbreaker. Huffington Post Highline. http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/miracleindustry/americas-most-admired-lawbreaker/
6 J&J proudly displays the Credo, written by Chairman and member of the founding family Robert Wood Johnson, on its web site. See http://www.jnj.com/about-jnj/jnj-credo/??sitelink=The+JJ+Credo&utm_campaign=J%26J+Love&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=j%26j%20credo&utm_content=J%26J+-+Heritage+-+E Accessed Sept. 7, 2015