Can PR ever be ethical?

Facing a dilemma
For this issue we had a very interesting first exercise in class, as we’ve been put in front of a hard dilemma: we had to imagine having the power to divert a fast train, going to kill 5 people, to another direction where it would kill “only” our mum or our best friend… So would you divert the train?? Only 2 people answered in class, proudly saying that they would prefer to kill 1 person than 5, so would divert the train. According to the teacher most of people would say they are unable to make this choice… Well I said it was a hard one, but actually a very quick and instinctive decision came to me: I would protect my mum or my friend!! So does that mean I’m a bad and selfish person? I would say that my attachment to people is probably more important to me than the life of anonymous people, and I think that is a human reaction… If the first thing you see is that you need to protect the people you care about, is that selfish? Anyway, I think in the situations where you have to decide quickly you don’t have time to think about what is good or bad, but just follow your instinct. So my answer to this exercise doesn’t mean that I’ll always blindly protect my clients in my future professional life (if ever I work in a PR agency): first, I’ll have more time to take my decisions when I’ll have to face ethical problems; secondly, I guess I won’t have the same attachment to my clients as for my mum or my best friend…
Then, we had another exercise: we had to decide if we would accept to work in a PR campaign promoting a tobacco company in Mexico, where it’s legal but where heart and lung diseases are very highly spread… First I was ready to go on, while trying to adapt the campaign to only existing smokers; and I thought “well, if I don’t take it someone else will, so it’s better if I have some control on it”… But control on what? With or without me the campaign was going to encourage people, old or not, to smoke anyway, and I have no power to change this. So if I’m not agreeing with the campaign, I’d better leave it; and anyway if you’re not enthusiastic about a communication job can you really work well on it? I also thought that I could feel remorse after having participated in a “killing campaign”…
It’s sometimes very difficult to define your own moral standards and limits, and the conclusion I came to was that business decisions have to be thought through and adapted to each case, in order not to regret it too much later.

A “two-way communication” is utopian
This leads us to the ethical problem of conflicts of interest: when the public interest doesn’t match the organisation interest. In the PR week’s Ethics Debate organised in February 2007, some argued for a PR which has sometimes to lie, and some for a PR which should never lie. But those last ones (George Pitcher, Founder of Luther Pendragon and curate of St Bride, and Simon Lewis, Group Corporate affairs Director of Vodafone) didn’t show moral motivations in their arguments: they basically said that if the news is not out, it will be in someone else’s blog…So their arguments were aimed at their own benefit, not the public benefit. That’s why I think that having a 100% ethical speech, using reasoned persuasion and telling all the truth, is utopian.
Indeed, PR is a “hemispheric communication”, as Jensen said (1997): it’s aimed to the interest of the organisation that makes it, even if the public interest can be beneficial to the organisation. But I’m not saying that PR should be totally unethical! There are actually different “ethical degrees” in PR, if we believe what Gruning and Hunt wrote in 1984: the less ethical one would be false information transmitted to a passive and ignorant audience, and the "ideal-utopian" one a two-way communication between negotiating equals. But there are 2 other degrees in the middle, which are very likely to be the most used in the industry.

Reason vs emotion
Another ethical problem in PR is manipulation: how far can we go in order to persuade our audience? Being totally ethical would be persuading people through reason, by explaining and defending arguments. That’s what Kevin Moloney suggests in his book Rethinking Public Relations: The Spin and the Substance (2000). So why PR practitioners so often prefer playing with our emotions in order to get their messages across? I think it’s simply because it’s more efficient: it’s quicker, and for sure in some cases people would be less convinced if they were thinking with reasoned arguments… And as PR is a business, people have to choose the most efficient way to make it, as if they don’t someone else will…

Indirect PR regulation as the most efficient
So this makes me think of how we can regulate this manipulation, forgetting about an utopian idealistic PR: I think that we still can use a few direct regulations, like organising company’s PR audits in order to test its social and community impact, and which would be published in media companies’ annual reports, or having journalistic versions of official reports… But I think the limit of a direct regulation is that PR is not only commercial, like advertising, so we can't have an authoritative control on it: what if the journalist writing an article from a press release really believes what he’s writing? Can we still flag up his copy as “advertorial”? As PR is a more subtle practice, I think it should be regulated in a more subtle way: indirectly.
I think this can be possible thanks to pluralism, which exists in our modern democracies: pressure groups like consumerists, environmentalists and trade-unionists can counter-balance PR manipulation. But the limit is that if we allow everyone to speak we’ll always have irresponsible media, saying false or manipulative information. And if we want to forbid them with an authoritative control on the media, we loose pluralism…
That’s why I think the best solution against PR manipulation is citizens’ education: “Society would be best served if people were trained in the skills necessary to recognize manipulative use of rhetoric”, said Stauber and Rampton (1995). Indeed, I believe that the best way not to be a victim of our society's manipulation is to learn how this society and its members work: PR awareness and understanding could be the key to bringing a more ethical PR.

Sources:
-Michaela O’Brien and Pam Williams' 6th February 2008 presentation, University of Westminster
-Crush P. “PRWeek Ethic Debate: the truth hurts”, PRWeek, February 2007
-Moloney K. Rethinking Public Relations: The Spin and the Substance, Routledge, 2000
-Curran J. and Seaton J. Power Without Responsibility, Routledge, 2003