Head to Head: Is there room for ethics in PR?
In this new series, Mumbrella invites the industry’s most senior PR professionals to share their opposing views on the industry’s biggest issues. This week’s Head to Head pits Annalise Brown, founder and managing director, Hidden Characters against marketing and advertising consultant Toby Ralph.
This week, debating whether or not there is room for ethics in PR, Annalise Brown says PR agencies and professionals need to call out bad behaviour, while Toby Ralph believes everyone has the right to have their case heard.
Yes, argues Annalise Brown, founder and managing director at Hidden Characters:
One of the biggest issues we face in society, not just in Australia, but globally is that people have lost trust. Trust in politicians, industry bodies and in brands, news and relationships. While this has a lot to do with things out of our control, it also has a lot to do with things in our arena.
Fake news, disingenuous relationships that brands have developed with celebrities and our audiences becoming clues to social media shenanigans. Do we not have a duty to ourselves to instil ethics in everything we do, to ensure we are assisting in fixing the problem?
Ethics in PR relates to an individual practitioner’s professional actions/behaviour and the actions/behaviour of their clients they are willing to “walk past”.
Toby has jumped the shark by confusing doing PR for unpopular causes with unethical PR practice. You can work for an unpopular cause and act ethically. It’s when that cause wants its PR agency to intentionally lie to the public or it’s directors act corruptly and want their actions covered up, that any serious PR person would walk away on ethical grounds.
The simple advice for young practitioners on acting ethically is that if you start wondering if something is unethical, then it probably is. A good reference is the Public Relations Institute of Australia’s Code of Ethics that has been in place for over 40 years.
Should I take this gig?
I agree the murderer needs to be well-represented in court – but that’s different from handing the murderer the gun. To continue the legal analogy, the PR person involved in supporting or driving use/uptake of something noxious is not the barrister defending the person accused of murder; they are an accessory to the murder.
Whether you want to call it “PR ethics” or personal ethics is up for grab, but yes, it’s about me, and it IS personal. I can’t support tobacco use by day, and go home and tell my children not to smoke by night.
What’s more, all of us do better work when genuinely engaged.
I’m with Toby Ralph,
Confusion in the industry over the difference between ethics and personal morality is a signal of the decline in professionalism and disregard of our own sector for the disciplines of what we do.
By all means do business by virtue-signalling and wearing your heart on your sleeve, but that’s not a profession.
Me, I want to be hired not because I agree with my clients, but because I know how to marshal opinion to secure their objective.
How I go about doing that is a question of professional ethics. Whether I can live with the outcome of success at my job is personal morality.