Ethics are concerned with how we should live and make decisions regarding what is right and wrong. For PR professionals, making ethical decisions means balancing the public interest, their employer's interests, professional standards, and personal values. However, these areas often conflict, putting PR professionals in vague ethical situations like over-representing products or taking sides on issues that harm the environment. Professional codes of ethics from organizations like PRSA provide guidance, emphasizing values like advocacy, honesty, and fairness. Ultimately, PR professionals are expected to maintain personal ethics by being honest, respecting all parties, and balancing loyalty and duty.

1. Ethics and
Professionalism

2. Ethics Defined:
“Ethics is concerned with how we should
live our lives. It focuses on questions
about what is right or wrong, fair or unfair,
caring or uncaring, good or bad,
responsible or irresponsible, and the like.”
(Jaksa and Pritchard, “Methods of Analysis”)

3. “Four-Way Test” for Ethical Decision Making
(from Rotary International)
 Is it the truth?
 Is it fair to all concerned?
 Will it build goodwill and better friendships?
 Will it be beneficial to all concerned?

4. Professionals have the burden of making
ethical decisions that satisfy:
 The public interest
 Their employer’s (or client’s) self interest
 The standards of the profession
 Their personal values
In an ideal world, these four areas would not conflict but in reality they
often do.
“How many PR people have been
asked to over-represent a product? How many agencies have
been asked to take sides on issues that conflict with a healthy
environment? The answer is that many of us participate in areas
where ethical standards are vague at best.” (comments from a
senior PR executive in PRSA’s The Strategist)

5. Public Expectations of PR?
 Society, in general, expects public relations people to be
advocates, just as they expect advertising copywriters to
make a product sound attractive, journalists to be objective,
and attorneys to defend someone in court
 But communication efforts will not attempt, for example to
present false/deceptive/misleading information under the
guise of literal truth no matter how strongly the practitioners
want to convince others of the merits of a particular
clients/organization’s position/cause…(from Martinson, Florida
International University)

6. Professional Codes of Ethics in PR
 The Public Relations Society of America (PRSSA) Code of
Ethics
 PRSA Code (more detailed) online at:
http://www.prssa.org/downloads/codeofethics.pdf
 The Code’s core values:
Advocacy Independence
Honesty Loyalty
Expertise Fairness
 PRSA, with 22,000 members in 110 U.S chapters, is the world’s
largest national PR organization
 South Carolina PRSA Chapter: http://www.scprsa.org/
 In second and third place (size-wise) are the International
Association of Business Communicators (IABC) and the
International Public Relations Association (IPRA)

7. Personal Ethics
 Be honest at all times
 Convey a sense of business ethics based on your own
standards and those of society
 Respect the integrity and position of your opponents and
audiences
 Develop trust by emphasizing substance over triviality
 Present all sides of an issue
 Strive for a balance between loyalty to the organization and
duty to the public
 Don’t sacrifice long-term objectives for short-term gains