The topic of ethics presents both a challenge and an opportunity to public relations practitioners. In a world where far too many consider “public relations ethics” an oxymoron, those who practice public relations frequently must deal with diverse ethical dilemmas. Yet few practitioners have developed frameworks for making ethical judgments.
Noting that public relations practice offers “unique and challenging ethical issues,” the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) encourages its members to “protect and advance the free flow of accurate and truthful information.” Through its Member Code of Ethics, PRSA also encourages “informed decision making through open communication” and urges public relations people to strengthen public trust in the industry.1
Ethics involves questions of moral behavior and the difficult choices people face when trying “to do the right thing.” It concerns moral principles that govern human behavior and the moral correctness of specified conduct. Ethics scholar Richard Johannesen (1983) says ethical situations are multifaceted and usually arise when a moral agent (the one making the ethical decision) commits an act (either verbal or nonverbal) within a specific context with a particular motive directed at an audience. Johannesen stresses that each of these factors need to be taken into account before passing judgment on the outcome of any moral scenario.
Steven R. Van Hook (2011), who has both practiced and taught public relations, points out the public relations department often is the “ethical heart” of most organizations. Public relations ethics scholar Thomas Bivens (2006) notes people seek accountability and “want to know who is responsible for certain actions and who is accountable for the consequences of those actions” (p. 19). Van Hook notes that even though “many people perceive public relations to be something less than respectable,” those responsible for internal and external communications in an organization control the flow of both good and bad news to employees, customers, stockholders, and other strategic stakeholders. He also notes public relations people are part of organizational decision making.
About This Book
This book represents a practical guide to ethical decision making tailored specifically to the needs of public relations students and practitioners. We do not spend much time on the day-to-day ethical issues every white-collar worker faces, whether mundane or serious—from whether it’s wrong to bring pens home from the office or to sleep with a client or boss. Rather, we focus on issues arising from public relations’ role within society, especially the potential to abuse techniques of communication, persuasion, and advocacy.
We trace the development of ethical theory from the ancient Greeks to modern time to give the reader an understanding of the principles that underlie current standards of behavior. But the book’s major emphasis is on practical application of these theories and principles through the analysis of contemporary cases. Our goal is to guide readers in building a personal framework for ethical reasoning that will enable them to do the following:
• Recognize the ethical issues at play in the practice of public relations, including those inherent in business decisions that do not directly involve the public relations function.
• Analyze the conflicting duties and loyalties at play in these situations, as well as the likely consequences to all affected publics, so they can choose the best option in their own practice or counsel their clients in their decision making.
• And, finally, justify their decision and/or counsel in terms that others will understand and ultimately accept.
Our book fills a gap in currently available literature on the subject, most of which lacks either theoretical grounding or practical application. Unlike other books that focus on the broad field “mass communication,” this book focuses solely upon public relations and cites illustrative cases spanning a wide range of its functions.
Although we do not advocate a specific ethical approach, we attempt to give readers sufficient grounding in the major theories of normative ethics to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each, and to construct their own frameworks, appropriate to their circumstances.
The Importance of Ethics
Public relations counselor Bob Dilenschneider has represented a third of the Fortune 500 companies and, from that vantage point, he has concluded that ethics has never been more important. “The desire to succeed at any cost is washing over the world in a relentless wave, flying in the face of ethics and integrity,” he warns. “It takes strong willed people to resist it, and there are fewer strong-willed people today than there used to be.”2 Governments have issued stacks of new regulations and imposed layers of additional oversight in response to corporate scandals. And misconduct by leaders of institutions from our colleges and churches to our sports teams and news organizations has severely rocked public confidence. That may be why the 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer shows “an evaporation of trust across all institutions” not only in business but also in government, media, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).3 The practice of public relations is not immune from these forces. In fact, it could be complicit.
Although few have ever perceived public relations to be a highly ethical industry, in recent years its reputation has taken serious hits thanks in no small part to the actions of a few prominent practitioners. For example, Hill & Knowlton prepped the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter to give false testimony before a Congressional committee in the run-up to the first Gulf War.4 Ketchum and ConAgra tricked food bloggers into eating Marie Callender’s frozen food when they thought they were dining on meals prepared by noted chefs,5 and two FleishmanHillard executives were jailed for fraudulently billing the Los Angeles Water Department.6 Not to mention an abundance of unpaid internships that some say are unfair to public relations students, especially when the agencies bill clients for their time.
Theoretical Foundations
According to ethics scholar J.C. Callahan (1988), the formal study of ethics can be divided into four subareas: meta-ethics, descriptive ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. Meta-ethics concentrates on what morality is by examining the meanings of ethical terms, the nature of ethical judgments, and various types of ethical arguments. Descriptive ethics, also known as comparative ethics, studies what people believe about morality. Normative ethics provides the foundation for decision making through the development of general rules and principles of moral conduct. Applied ethics is concerned with using these theoretical norms to solve real-world ethical problems.
The study of ethics can provide a framework for making difficult moral choices at every stage of the decision-making process, from identifying and analyzing ethical issues to weighing and justifying options to resolve them. Inevitably, this process will reveal conflicts among competing values and interests. The study of ethics cannot always settle such conflicts, but it can provide the tools to unravel them by clarifying such concepts as truth, fairness, respect, integrity, and loyalty. That not only makes it easier to live with our choices but it also makes justifying them easier. As many public relations practitioners have discovered, knowing how to justify an ethical decision is almost as important as the decision itself.
Normative Ethics
Most of the scholarly research exploring public relations ethics has focused on normative ethics. As described in more detail in later chapters, the study of normative ethics has historically concentrated on three areas: virtue (ethical behavior depends on moral character), duty (actions are right or wrong in themselves), and consequences (results determine whether an action is right or wrong).
As we explain in Chapter 3, the study of virtue ethics can be traced back to ancient Greece where Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE) said virtue could be identified and practiced. His disciple, Plato (c. 428–348 BCE) encouraged moral conduct even in situations where responsible behavior might be different from societal norms. His student, Aristotle (c. 384–322 BCE) stressed that moral virtue frequently required difficult choices (Blackburn, 2001). This Greek interest in virtue has been credited by some for developing a school of thought concerned with the nature of goodness and self-discipline as advocated by Epictetus (c. 55–135 AD), who stressed individuals must be responsible for their own actions (Plaisance, 2014).
Deontology, or the study of duty-based ethics, judges people by their actions regardless of the consequences and is discussed in greater detail in Chapters 5 and 6. Deontologists believe acts are moral or immoral by their very nature regardless of consequences or outcomes.
This theory’s major advocate was Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) a German philosopher who authored the categorical imperative, a moral principle he considered absolute and unconditional. For example, he believed it required people to tell the truth even if it resulted in harm to others (Hinman, 2012). At the core of Kant’s ethical thinking was his strong belief humans never should treat other people as a means to an end.
Public relations ethics scholar Shannon A. Bowen (2004) sees considerable relevance for public relations in Kant’s thesis and has proposed a theoretical model for ethical decision making in public relations that is based upon Kant’s categorical imperative and James E. Grunig’s two-way symmetrical model of public relations.
Teleology, or the study of consequence-based ethics, focuses on the end result of an act or a decision. Teleological ethics has two basic approaches, ethical egoism and utilitarianism. Ethical egoists make decisions based on what result is best for their own self-interests. This philosophy dates back to Epicurus (c. 342–271 BCE), who advocated people should do those things that would lead to their own satisfaction.
Utilitarianism, which is covered more completely in Chapter 7, is an ethical philosophy that fosters whatever is best for society as a whole, endeavoring to provide “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) is recognized as the founder of utilitarianism, a theory also advocated and promoted by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). More modern versions of utilitarianism focus on either acts or rules. Rule utilitarianism is concerned with what rule or action, when followed, will maximize the greatest good for the greatest number. Act utilitarianism places little value in precepts, claiming rules such as “thou shalt not kill,” “never lie,” and so forth only provide rough directions for ethical experiences.
Ethics and Individual Public Relations Practitioners
Kenneth F. Goodpaster and John B. Matthews (1989) claim the desire for ethical behavior has deep roots in the actions of individual people who wish to act responsibly. As one of us has explained previously, this endorses the notion that some individual public relations people might elect to be ethical while others might not (Wright, 1996). As we explain in greater detail in Chapter 11, most people understand clear-cut differences between good and evil, right and wrong, and similar dichotomies. However, when ethical decision making comes down to the bottom line, the final arbiter in separating right from wrong or good from evil is the free will of the individual decision maker.
Goodpaster and Matthews maintain that the notion of ethical responsibility has three meanings: who is to blame, what has to be done, and what we think of someone’s moral reasoning. The first meaning of responsibility concerns who is the cause of an action or event, (i.e., who is answerable for it). The second meaning concerns what standards or social norms one should be following. This most often occurs when individuals are responsible to others: lawyers to clients, physicians to patients; or, in the communication context, journalists to their readers and public relations managers to their organizations, their clients, or the public at large. The third meaning reflects our judgment that an individual has made reliable and trustworthy moral decisions.
Ethics and Decision Making
The topic of ethics has attracted a good deal of attention throughout the public relations field over the past few decades perhaps because practitioners frequently are bombarded with many diverse ethical situations and too few of them have developed frameworks for making ethical judgments. Ethical decision making depends on both the decision-making process and on the decision makers—their experience, intelligence, and integrity.
Much of the applied communication and ethics literature centers on the role of the decision maker in ethical behavior, and an important aspect of many public relations jobs is trying to help management make business decisions that have ethical implications. In this process, the ethical question might be whether or not to do something as much as whether or not to say something. Unfortunately, for some it is easy to say nothing and later blame the unethical results on somebody else’s decision. When he was Chairman and CEO of the Bank of America, Dick Rosenberg told an audience of corporate public relations professionals, “We don’t shoot people for bringing us bad news; we shoot them for delivering it too late.”7 This view suggests that public relations executives who can head off serious problems before they blow up in the company’s face, surface in the news media or blogs, or ruin an individual’s reputation are two steps ahead of the game.
Unfortunately, the people who make the decisions in American business do not always possess responsible moral judgments. Psychologist and management consultant Saul Gellerman (1998) lists four reasons why managers do things that ultimately can inflict considerable harm on their organizations. They are as follows:
1. A belief that the activity is within reasonable ethical limits—that is, that it is not “really” illegal or immoral.
2. A belief that the activity is in the individual’s or the organization’s best interests and that the manager would somehow be expected to undertake the activity.
3. A belief that the activity is “safe” and will never be found out or publicized.
4. A belief that because the activity helps the organization the company will condone it and even protect the manager.
Harvard business school professor Kenneth R. Andrews (1989) contends that ethical decisions require three qualities that individuals can identify and develop. These are given below:
1. Competence to recognize ethical issues and to think through the consequences of alternative resolutions.
2. Self-confidence to seek out different points of view and then to decide what is right at a given place and time, in a particular set of relationships and circumstances.
3. “Tough-mindedness,” which is the willingness to make decisions when all that needs to be known cannot be known and when the questions that press for answers have no established and incontrovertible solutions (p. 2).
Some Basic Questions
As we said earlier, most people understand the clear-cut differences in moral choice. They can recognize and decide what is good or evil, right or wrong, honest or dishonest. Nevertheless, many in our society assume that communication practitioners believe they can act unethically as long as they resolve conflicting claims in their own hearts and minds. That perception may reflect the fact that most people—in and out of public relations—do often rationalize questionable behavior. For example, one way or another, most people break some law at least once a day. The speed limit is 65 miles per hour but a person drives 72 (“everyone’s doing it; it would be unsafe to do otherwise”). People jaywalk (“no traffic, why walk to the corner and then back?”). Healthy people sometimes park their cars in places reserved for handicapped drivers.
Furthermore, merely breaking the law is not necessarily equivalent to acting unethically. Sometimes adhering to the law can be unethical, as examples of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi illustrate. Drawing the line is not always cut and dry. And in some situations deciding what is ethical can be perplexing. For example, food industry consultant Ron Paul (1994) pointed out that, although the fast-food industry is frequently called unethical for producing meals high in fat and cholesterol and encouraging obesity, nobody forces people to eat its products. However, sociologist George Ritzer (2014) suggests economic realities might force lower income families to eat unhealthy fast food. Complicating matters further, in recent years, retailers have been accused of “vanity sizing,” by changing labels on “extra-large” sized clothes to “large” or “medium” so customers will ignore the reality they are gaining weight. Is that unethical?
Public Relations Codes of Ethics
As we address in greater detail in Chapter 12, one way public relations associations have responded to ethical concerns is with formalized codes of ethics. However, as public relations scholars Scott Cutlip, Allen Center, and Glen Broom (1985) have argued, the enforcement of these codes of conduct is uneven and infrequent. Also, as James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt (1984) explain, many public relations people do not belong to professional associations and have no membership obligations to uphold codes of ethics.
Mini-Case8
The case of a noted Detroit-based public relations person clearly illustrates the lack of enforcement quotient. In 1986, Tony Franco, the President and CEO of Anthony M. Franco, Inc., Detroit’s largest independent public relations firm, held the highest elected office in PRSA. Today that position is called, “chairman” but in 1986 it was “president.” Mr. Franco enjoyed a strong reputation for social responsibility and charitable giving. For example, he donated $1.2 million to St. Joseph Mercy Oakland Hospital in Pontiac, Michigan. But a number of concerns surfaced after a petition was filed accusing him of various violations of PRSA’s Code of Ethics during his presidential year. Rather than face possible disciplinary action by the PRSA committee responsible for managing the association’s code of conduct, Mr. Franco immediately resigned his membership in PRSA, including the presidency. But if he had been a medical doctor, an attorney licensed to practice law, or someone from most of the other more traditional professions, he could not have so easily avoided scrutiny of his actions and being found guilty of violating the code of conduct probably would have led to some kind of professional suspension. However, since his occupation was public relations, Mr. Franco continued to practice and his agency remained highly successful. He retired in 1994 and sold his firm, passing away in 2002. Today the Franco Public Relations Group is Detroit’s most successful, independent public relations agency.
Public Relations and Professionalism
The Franco example provides a good transition into the final point we will address briefly in this first chapter: the question of whether or not public relations is a “profession,” and whether or not those who practice public relations are “professionals.” Scholarly literature has plenty to say about defining a profession. Medicine and law lead the list of the most elite of the “traditional professions” (Williams, 2008, January 6). Scholars such as A.M. Carr-Sanders and P.A. Wilson (1933), Everett C. Hughes (1965), Myron Liberman (1956), and Morris L. Cogan (1955) generally include the clergy. Lieberman (1956, pp. 2–6) claims eight criteria distinguish professions from occupations:
1. A profession must perform unique and essential services.
2. It must emphasize intellectual techniques.
3. It must have a long period of specialized training to acquire a systematic body of knowledge based on research.
4. It must be given a broad range of autonomy.
5. Its practitioners must accept broad, personal responsibility for judgments and actions.
6. It must place greater emphasis on service than on private economic gain.
7. It must develop a comprehensive self-governing organization.
8. It must have a code of ethics which has been clarified and interpreted by concrete cases.
It would be difficult to argue public relations meets all of these requirements. For example, there is no comprehensive self-governing organization for public relations as there is for medicine and law. At best and in actual practice, public relations is what Abraham Flexner (1915, June 26) termed a “semi-profession,” an occupation that meets some, but not all, of the criteria for a true profession. But rather than considering some occupations “professions” and others “trades,” we contend the question of professionalism should be asked in terms of individuals and not entire groups of people practicing an occupation. This is to agree with Howard M. Vollmer and Donald L. Mills (1966) who advocate their concept of “professionalization” pointing out there are some practitioners of every occupation who act as professionals and there are others who do not, something we will explore more fully in the following chapters.
Although there are “public relations professionals” who function effectively and ethically, there also are people who practice public relations in a less than professional manner. That is why throughout this book we rarely use the term “public relations professional” to identify those who work in public relations, preferring terms such as “practitioner,” or “manager.”
In the end, what separates public relations professionals from mere practitioners is an abiding concern with the very topic of this book—how to practice their craft without losing their souls. One dictionary definition of “soul” is “a person’s deeply felt moral and emotional nature.”9 Anthropologists might characterize such feelings as evolutionary adaptations to enhance group survival in a threatening world; believers, as the God-given spark of immortal life. But atheist and believer alike recognize the deepest of those feelings in our lifelong search for meaning.
New York Times columnist David Brooks calls the search for meaning “one of the few phrases acceptable in modern parlance to describe a fundamentally spiritual need.” But he cautions it is not the “warm tingling” we get when we feel particularly significant and meaningful. “If we look at the people in history who achieved great things,” he points out, “it wasn’t because they wanted to bathe luxuriously in their own sense of meaningfulness. They subscribed to moral systems—whether secular or religious—that recommended specific ways of being, and had specific structures of what is right and wrong, and had specific disciplines about how you might get better over time.”10 That is the source of true meaning.
It is the search for meaning that separates professional from practitioner. Practitioners find meaning in whatever enhances themselves, whatever produces that tingly feeling. Professionals find meaning outside themselves. John Gardner perhaps described it best:
Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something.11
We hope in these pages to connect you with some of humankind’s experience in exploring these questions of right and wrong, good and bad. We hope to put you in closer touch with your own values and beliefs. And in the process, we hope to give you the opportunity to discover the true meaning of your practice of public relations.
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1 The PRSA “Member Code of Ethics,” last revised in 2000, is available online at: http://www.prsa.org/aboutprsa/ethics/#.U_t_FFZRzwI. Accessed Sept. 4, 2015. For an interesting history of the PRSA code, see Fitzpatrick, K. (2002, Feb) “PRSA Code of Ethics Moves From Enforcement to Inspiration” at: http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/6048100/history-prsas-code-ethics-moves-from-enforcement-inspiration. Accessed Sept. 4, 2015.
2 Source: Conversation with Robert Dilenschneider on March 10, 2015.
3 The Edelman public relations agency has been surveying the public’s level of trust in various institutions since 2000. The 2015 survey cited here is available at: http://www.edelman.com/2015-edelman-trust-barometer/. Accessed Sept. 4, 2014.
4 The tearful testimony of the Ambassador’s daughter is available on C-SPAN. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmfVs3WaE9Y Accessed Sept. 4, 2015. Hill & Knowlton’s role in preparing her testimony is described in chapter 10 of Toxic Sludge Is Good For You (Stauber, J. and Ramdon, S., 2002, Common Courage Press, Monroe, Me.) excerpted online at PRWatch, http://www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html. Accessed Sept. 4, 2015.
5 The Gawker website gleefully reported the incident. See Hamilton Nolan, H. (2011, September 7). ConAgra forced to apologize for tricking bloggers into eating ConAgra food, http://gawker.com/5837896/conagra-forced-to-apologize-for-tricking-bloggers-into-eating-conagra-food. Accessed Sept. 4, 2015.
6 See Spano, J. (2006, May 17). Dowie, aide guilty on all counts in bill scam. Los Angeles Times. http://articles.latimes.com/2006/may/17/local/me-dowie17. Accessed July 22, 2015.
7 Rosenberg, R. (1991, Sept. 20). Remarks to the San Francisco Academy. San Francisco, CA.
8 This mini-case was developed from “A quarter century of contributions.” Crain’s Detroit Business. May 2, 2010. Accessed September 4, 2014, at http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20100502/SUB01/100439980/a-quarter-century-of-contributions.
9 Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. (n.d.). http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/soul
10 Brooks, D. (2015, January 5). The problem with meaning. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/opinion/david-brooks-the-problem-with-meaning.html. Accessed July 22, 2015.
11 From “Personal Renewal,” a speech John Gardner delivered to McKinsey & Company in Phoenix, AZ., on November 10, 1990. See: http://www.pbs.org/johngardner/sections/writings_speech_1.html. Accessed July 22, 2015.