Ethics and Social Responsibility in Public Relations

In reading about ethics in PR, the most important concept I took away from the chapter is the fact that ethics are ACTIVE, not passive. To me, this is very important because it means ethics are about what you do, not what you say you are going to do.

Navigating the ethical waters of business and public relations can be tricky because ethics are derived from our values, and values clearly differ from culture to culture. Because of this, I think many corporations and organizations can find themselves in situations that might be ethically compromising. While an organization as a whole might have a defined set of ethics, their ethical beliefs may or may not equate to the ethical beliefs of their employees, or their clientele.

Because ethics can be such a grey area, I wanted to see what the PRSA had to say about this issue. I know that in prior classes we've discussed case studies about ethical problems and for the most part these situations weren't necessarily black or white, and the class discussions had a lot of varied opinions about how the incidents should have been handled.

These are some bullet points the PRSA points out for dealing with ethics:

The majority of these suggestions are straightforward and understandable, but there are a couple that I find vague and confusing. For example, "Work to strengthen the public's trust in the profession." How is this an ethical concern? The public should just inherently be able to trust that the profession is performing ethically, it should not have to try and persuade people and defend it's existence. If this is the case perhaps the PR profession should be re-defined. 

Additionally, "Act in the best interest of clients or employers" also raised a red flag for me. If you are acting in your employer's best interest, you may or may not be acting ethically. But if it's in their best interest it's justifiable? I think this list could be misinterpreted by many people working in PR. Public Relations, to me, is about how you can best serve the PUBLIC, not corporations or organizations, no matter what these groups agendas are.