Build code of ethics before your career

June 5th, 2008 at 12:00pm Kylie Crull

“Show me a PR person who is ‘accurate’ and ‘truthful,’ and I’ll show you a PR person who is unemployed. The reason companies or governments hire oodles of PR people is because PR people are trained to be slickly untruthful or half-truthful.” That is a quote from CBS Sunday Morning legal analyst Andrew Cohen’s commentary on Sunday, June 1. PRSA responded by calling Cohen’s challenge to the industry’s professionalism and integrity “one of the most blatant in at least a decade”. While I believe Cohen’s comments and views of the PR profession are over-generalized and out of date, it brings up an important issue we cannot ignore. Ironically, sometimes the greatest public perception challenges PR practitioners face is dealing with their own professional reputations.

The ethical and professional standards of PR have come a long way since the P.T. Barnum “any press is good press” days of manipulation and press agents. Now using a two-way asymmetric model of communication, PR professionals make continuous efforts to be honest and ethical to increase their credibility with the public and media. Today we uphold the idea that looking after the best interest of the public is also in the best interest of the organization.

It is a good idea to establish your own professional ethics before you start a PR career. To give some guidance, PRSA has a code of ethics that their members must abide to. There may be a time in your career when a client asks you to complete a task that conflicts with your personal and professional standards. If you refuse the task you may gain a clear picture of the people you work with and determine how you are valued within the organization. While accepting the task will label you as a team player, you will also go down with the team if you are caught being dishonest.

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