Ethics and the Law in Public Relations

During the week of April 4-8, my COM 370 Public Relations students and I will discuss the importance of ethics in the public relations profession. I know from my experience as a public relations practitioner and educator that professionals in any field must adopt a moral framework that guides ethical behavior. This is especially important in the public relations profession, where practitioners must earn and maintain the trust of their audiences.

Author and public relations expert Frazier Seitel noted, "The practice of public relations is all about earning credibility." He added, "Credibility in turn, begins with telling the truth. Public relations, then, must be based on 'doing the right thing' -- in other words, acting ethically."

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Ethical behavior has always been important in our field. Well publicized lapses in ethical decision making over recent decades suggest we must pay more attention to ethics. Think, for instance, about the costs and impact on public confidence of the following scandals:

Watergate. A 1972 burglary at a Washington, D.C., office building that involved the theft of political documents and attempts to cover up the incident by U.S. President Richard Nixon and his administration led to Nixon's resignation.

Enron. Shareholders in this massive energy company lost nearly $11 billion when Enron executives and accountants conspired to hide from the public the company's impending bankruptcy.


Madoff Ponzi Scheme. In 2008, investment manager Bernard Madoff revealed that he and his investment firm had bilked investors out of nearly $65 billion dollars over several years. The investigation into this scheme and efforts to collect assets to repay investors continue.

Hence, according to the Institute for Public Relations, "The ability to engage in ethical reasoning is growing in demand and in importance in public relations. Academic research, education and professional practice all are focused more than ever on ethics." (Click here to read more.)

Best-selling author Don Tapscott has attributed the increased demand for ethics in business to the transparency of our digital world. In "Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World," Tapscott reported, "Integrity is the foundation of the new enterprise. In North America, Net Genners define integrity as being honest, considerate, and transparent. They expect employers to be this way and live by their commitments. Young people respond well to management integrity and quickly become engaged."

Don Tapscott

In Macrowikinomics, Tapscott noted the importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and how increased demand for ethics has changed the way businesses apply CSR over the last decade. According to Tapscott, "Ten years ago, advocates of so-called corporate social responsibility (CSR) coined an expression: You do well by doing good. They were wrong. At the time, it was possible for organizations to do well by behaving badly — for example, by having terrible labor practices, employing “creative accounting”, being a monopoly, externalizing their costs onto society, having shady environmental behaviors, having lousy products, abandoning customers, and so on.

However, Tapscott wrote, "Increasingly, because of the new, open world driven by mass online collaboration, that expression for CSR is finally becoming true." Moreover, Tapscott added, "The overwhelming reason for this step change in recent years is transparency. There is strong evidence that companies and other organizations are being forced to act with integrity, not just by regulators and institutional shareholders, but also because of the transparency of this networked age. Thanks to a broad range of online technologies — such as blogs, social media and wikis — the public can very quickly and very easily find out what’s really going on. They can inform others, and they can organize collective responses."

Note to students: Learn more about Don Tapscott and his research into you, the students, or the "Net Generation." Click the link underneath the picture of Don, below, to watch his viral video, "Hey Moron," which dispels conventional myths about today's youth.

"Hey, moron!"

Click here to play video.

Though certain situations might tempt us to stray, it is absolutely essential for a public relations professional (and student) to develop a moral framework and use ethical principles to guide behavior at all times. Furthermore, it is not enough to discipline oneself to behave ethically. A public relations professional must often become "the conscience of an organization," willing and able to offer ethical and legal counsel to senior leaders, clients, and colleagues.

This includes the need for public relations experts to operate within and offer counsel on legal guidelines. Most public relations managers have taken courses in communication law and work closely with an organization's lawyers to ensure legal as well as ethical behavior. Read this blog post by the Public Relations Society of America about a practitioner's role in managing ethical and legal behavior.

ADM Leighton W. Smith Jr.

Let me leave you with a few words by a former boss of mine, Admiral Leighton W. "Snuffy" Smith, U.S. Navy (Retired). Admiral Smith served as the commander-in-chief of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO's) military forces in Southern Europe in the mid-1990s and I was his chief of public affairs officer. Together, we deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1995 to 1996 to implement the military provisions of the international peace accords that ended a three-year war in the Balkans. 

Admiral Smith and I faced many ethical and legal dilemmas during our time together, which were complicated by the international nature of our operations (see sidebar story, below). No, not all nations or citizens share the same legal or moral principles. Many times these principles had to be negotiated, which risked moving us into an "ethical relativism" that could result in basing ethics on the particular situation at hand. When this happens, one often loses any sense of ethics and begins to behave in whatever manner the situation calls for. Admiral Smith, one of the most ethical leaders I have ever served with, said this about the importance of ethics in all situations:

Admiral Smith with journalists,
Sarajevo, Bosnia, 1996.

"It appears that there are occasions where perhaps some people thought that they could bend the rules a little bit from an ethical perspective because of the situation they happened to be in. I don’t happen to think that ethics is a situation. And so, what you’re really trying to do is … it sounds so damn simple and it’s almost embarrassing to say it … but it comes down to what’s right and wrong. And, one of the best definitions of integrity that I ever heard was being able to identify and keep your compass on true north in a storm. And we had a lot of storms, and I just tried to make sure I knew where true north [was]."

I invite your comments and welcome your thoughts on the vital role of ethics and law in the public relations profession. Please include personal and professional stories from your experience, along with any other examples that might inform our discussion.

Azra Basich, in custody. David Perry, The 

Lexington Herald-Leader, via Associated Press 

Sidebar Story: From The New York Times, April 4, 2011. Croation woman now living in the United States charged with atrocities during war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. "Friends say Azra Basic spoke of killings in the Bosnian war, but they believe she was forced to make impossible moral choices."

Click here to read the full story. (Caution: This article describes violent acts that are extremely offensive.)