An online seminar a few months ago gathered CCOs together to talk about advising corporate boards on issues of ESG (environment, social, governance) messaging, corporate purpose and related topics. I was interested because I am doing research on the PR capacity on corporate boards, because so many of the issues in PR—CSR, ESG, DEI etc—are being discussed by PR academics and professionals.
The outtake from this meeting was that ESG may need a new name because of the pushback being felt from consumers, investors and others in corporate America. An interesting concept was that any time something has three letters and becomes an acronym it is ripe for pejorative connotations. Using two words such as ‘corporate purpose’ is harder to misunderstand or misrepresent, and that is what one participant advocated. In other words, change the nomenclature but consider the practice.
The bottom line for these CCOs advising large corporate boards, beyond ensuring they had and could articulate a corporate purpose, was to consider two things.
- Employee Expectations: How does the board address any disconnects between corporate priorities, or values, and the employee experience?
- CEO Voice: Are protocols in place to ensure that the CEO can speak with authenticity, credibility, and conviction, in real-time, on topics that are germane to the interests of the business and its employees?
I agree with that. Proclaiming a purpose and expecting compliance from all employees is authoritarian, not genuine. CEOs speaking out can backfire or offend or be seen as shameless piggybacking on what is perceived to be the popular sentiment on cultural issues.
I’ve written about this before in a post advocating for neutrality in most cases, and also noting that the emphasis on social branding has led to an anti-woke corporate response to woke corporate messaging.
So I was intrigued recently to see an academic journal article addressing the unethical practice of asserting vs dialogue by organizations on social issues. The article was a case study on Larry Fink of Blackrock, an investment services and financial management firm, and his annual letter to CEOs, which leaves everyone trembling to obey because Blackrock owns ⅓ of all outstanding shares of major companies.
I had thought about the appropriateness of the annual Fink letter when I first heard about it at a different conference of CCOs a few years ago. Should so many organizations respond in sync to the opinions asserted by one powerful man or company?
The journal article addressed this directly. “Public relations, activism, and the culture of assertion: The case study of Blackrock’s Larry Fink and the Letter to the CEOs”, written by Joshua Foust and Burton St. John III of the University of Colorado-Boulder, was published in late December in theJournal of Public Relations Inquiry.
Fundamental PR is about two-way symmetrical relationships, mutual benefit for all publics or stakeholders, dialogue and listening. But in this article the authors note an increase in raw assertion and a disdain for dialogic speech. They conclude that “Fink uses his letter to shape shareholder views and actions, using the power of his position rather than facts either as a result of dialogue or to spark dialogue.”
So an academic article comes to the same conclusion I did when I first heard about the annual letter from Blackrock.
I then got to thinking that this “culture of assertion” is at the root of a problem I have both as a citizen and a public relations academic. We see an increase in assertive statements in our culture recently. Consider several assertions:
- “The vaccine is safe and effective.”
- “Whites need to acknowledge their privilege.”
- “It was the most fair election in history.”
The above statements, relative to the Covid pandemic, the spread of a specific DEI ideology, and questions about irregularities in the 2020 election are ubiquitous and assertive. But what’s worse is that responses to the contrary have been de-platformed or labeled as “disinformation.”
But in recent months the problem of assertion has been exposed. Now data is coming out and even Anthony Fauci, who once proclaimed “I am science,” has acknowledged they got things wrong about the origin of covid, the nature of its spread, and the efficacy of the vaccine. A growing chorus of Black intellectuals are opposing the “oppressor-victim” binary in explaining the scope, causes and solutions to racism and equality. Independent journalism and court cases have been showing that there were numerous incidents of fraud and suspicious activity in the last presidential election.
Journalists like Michael Shellenbarger, Matt Taibi, Bari Weiss and others through their work with the Twitter files, FOIA requests and other investigative journalism have been exposing the deception behind this culture of assertion. They have another name for it in their writing and in Congressional testimony: “the censorship industrial complex.”
Being assertive can be seen as laudatory, associated with positive adjectives like strong, confident, certain, competent. But assertion can also violate fundamental ethics of public relations practice and principles of democracy.
Ethicists talk about what makes an occupation a “profession.” The answer is that it has a valuable service to society at large. What is the “role morality” of publics relations? It is simply enabling informed decision-making in a democratic society. And people can not make informed decisions without all the information.
Asserting one’s own perspective and silencing opposing views is clearly toxic and should be confronted.
I’ll confront the culture of assertion by re-asserting some long-standing and valuable principles vital to democracy and consonant with ethical public relations practice: pluralism, marketplace of ideas, mutual understanding, discourse ethics, dialogic communications, engagement, empowerment, and listening.
There is a lot of talk in this election year about “threats to democracy.” Let us not let the public relations profession be one of them.
