Tag: ethics

Does PRSA Leadership Consider Gaslighting Ethical?

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For years, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) has designated September as ethics month. The organization also has its annual convention and leadership assembly, with delegates from every regional chapter, in October. So the last day of September is a good time on the cusp of the two to consider ethics and leadership in PRSA.

The key question as noted in the headline is whether the leadership of PRSA who promote ethics in the profession consider gaslighting to be an ethical action. That question comes up because that has been strongly alleged by one member, Mary Beth West, APR, Fellow PRSA.

West, a veteran PR professional and long-time PRSA member, has been in a long-term battle with PRSA leadership after she asked leadership questions about financial discrepancies, even to the point of non-compliance with New York State Law. She also requested information about finances and other leadership issues, such as the insider approach of the current board appointing their friends as new board members. She has continued complaining about a lack of disclosure and transparency.

“Disclosure of Information” is a provision of the PRSA Code of Ethics. However, after asking the PRSA leadership to basically adhere to its own code of ethics, West was met at first with stonewalling, and then with gaslighting, and even punitive retribution. PRSA leaders responded tersely, then harshly, and then threatened to take away her APR (Accreditation in Public Relations) and membership in the College of Fellows.  All this for being persistent in asking honest questions.

(Self-disclosure: I am also APR and a member of the PRSA College of Fellows).

Apart from her displeasure in PRSA leadership failure to follow its own ethics code, West is most concerned that members of PRSA are not aware of how the organization is being led and what is happening with their dues. This includes those members who will represent their chapter in a few weeks at the National Assembly. She has worked to bring these issues to light with her Facebook page called A Better PRSA and a series of YouTube videos documenting her interactions with the PRSA board called #prsagaslighting .

It is not clear if this issue will be resolved or sputter. But, it is not just something between West and the PRSA board; it is really between the board and all members. I know of more than a few long-time PRSA members who have let their memberships lapse or are considering doing so because of their own disappointment with leadership. 

The question is if those members who remain will take the time to review West’s documented evidence of questionable board behavior and then ask leadership some questions of their own. If more people do so, there may be a more honest and civil response. Or to use terminology from crisis theory, perhaps the board will be moved to more ethical response that eschews denial and attack the accuser strategies and moves to apology and corrective action. 

Public relations must take an ethical stand against a ‘culture of assertion’

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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.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska: https://www.pexels.com/photo/red-stop-word-coming-out-of-a-typewriter-5993648/

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. 

  1. Employee Expectations: How does the board address any disconnects between corporate priorities, or values, and the employee experience? 
  2. 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. 

Cookies Can Be Ethical

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The day after a session in my Advertising and Public Relations Ethics and Law class in which we discussed digital media, one student emailed me a link to a web site. She said it was an unusual example of a company showing an ethical respect for customers by allowing customers and other site visitors to customize their cookies, or the way in which they are tracked.

It wasn’t a major brand that I was aware of before my student shared it with me. It’s Levoit Air Purifiers, and they allow people to accept all, reject all, or select to turn on or off six categories of cookies, from necessary to functional, analytics to performance and more. I’d encourage you to go to the site and see for yourself.

in class we had talked about legal changes with regard to cookies and other aspects of online privacy. But there are still annoying pop-ups that you must disable to see content, and some still only give you the option to accept, not reject. Certainly very few offer this level of customization and control for the user.

Here are just a few reasons why this extreme number of options is ethical:

  • it is a demonstration of a relationship metric called “control mutuality,” in which all parties in a relationship have equal control of topics, opportunity to speak, and in this case digital tracking settings;
  • it demonstrates good discourse ethics, similar to above, meaning that the user is not at the mercy of an organization;
  • it demonstrates a unique form of utilitarianism, not in the classic sense of “greatest good for the greatest number,” but it explains cookies to the user in terms of how they might benefit them and not just the organization;
  • it’s the old fashioned “golden rule”–follks at the air purifier company have considered how they would like to be treated when a customer on someone else’s website.

For these and other reasons, respecting the rights of others and giving them agency over how they are tracked and communicated to is good ethics. It’s also smart for the company in terms of building positive, long-term relationships and reputation.

In other words, as I tell my students all the time: ethics = strategy.

The ethics of PR expertise

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The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) had an interesting webinar recently as part of a series on ethical values. The series is hosted by the organization’s Board of Ethics and Professional Standards (BEPS).

Each webinar in the series involves a panel discussion about the importance of a particular value in the PRSA Code of Ethics. There are six such values, which form the foundation for the six provisions of the code. The session I attended recently was focused on the ethical value of “expertise.”

The panelists, including two professionals and one educator, made some excellent points about the importance of the value of expertise in ethical practice of PR. Some stressed that a commitment to life-long learning is shown by valuing expertise, since the field is constantly evolving. Others brought up the importance of Accreditation in Public Relations (APR), because the process of earning accreditation helps a professional develop and prove and ethical mindset. Panelists also stressed that having both ethical and practical expertise enables professionals to counsel the C-suite.

As I listened, I had some of my own thoughts about expertise in public relations, and why it is an ethical concern:

  • It is important to know what public relations is. I have heard more than a few times someone claim to be a PR expert when they lack a fundamental understanding of what it is. Such people claim that PR is about image, or “getting the word out,” or the most cringe-inducing from an ethical standpoint–“putting an organization in a positive light.” This is unethical because it misrepresents the field and other professionals, and it provides a disservice to clients or organizations being served.
  • You can’t extend expertise in one area of public relations to the entire profession. I have heard people say marketing and public relations are all the same. Or they state that they will impose their corporate experience onto a nonprofit. Or they assume their years in media relations qualify them immediately for investor relations. The field of public relations is vast. Some core principles extend across the profession, but one should be hesitant to claim specific expertise in an area where they lack specific knowledge and experience.
  • Expertise requires knowing the context of the business or industry in which you work. You can’t be a good PR expert for a company or nonprofit or government entity if you don’t know intimately what they do and how they do it, their sources of revenue, their competitive landscape and history.

In a nutshell, pretending to have expertise when one does not is unethical, because it lacks transparency and honesty and does not have the best interest of others in mind.

But, all this means is that to truly be an ethical public relations professional, one must have the humility and integrity to admit a lack of expertise and then gain it. Becoming expert can involve asking good questions, doing robust research, attending a PRSA seminar, or reading good books and articles on the subject at hand.

A professional will be better for developing and maintaining true expertise. Even more so, so will the organizations served and the profession at large.

Ethically Speaking, Are You a Child Or an Adult?

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September is PRSA Ethics Month again and it brought to mind a memory.

Years ago, long before I was a professor, I was speaking about public relations at an event and brought up the subject of ethics. An audience member sneered: “you can’t teach ethics.”

Well,  now I actually do teach ethics. So I could say that gentlemen was wrong. But his implied point is worth considering. What he really meant to say. is that you can teach ethics classes but that doesn’t mean people will behave ethically.

To that I say, of course. You can preach the gospel, but not all will believe. You can teach the importance of research, but not all will do it. You can conduct a fundraising campaign, but not all. will give.

In any of the above examples, of course the individual has their own will and responses will vary. That does not mean NONE will respond favorably, and therefore does not mean the activity is pointless or without merit.

So, in teaching ethics, the goal is inspiration, to make conscious the ethical implications of what we do in the profession, and then to instill a curiosity about the right thing to do and a motivation to be ethical in all professional practice.

There are two things that help my students internalize a lot of the ethical theories, concept and issues we discuss in class: the four motivations for being an ethical professional, and the three levels of ethical character.  I would encourage any PR professional to consider these in their daily practice::

Four motivations for being an ethical professional:

  • Personal = characterized by self-regulation, driven by personal conscience
  • Organizational = a concern for the corporate or organizational reputation, could be driven by policy or internal ethics code
  • Professional = to enhance the profession of public relations, in keeping with the 6th provision of the PRSA Code of Ethics
  • Societal = characterized by a big-picture concern for others, driven by a desire to contribute to the well-being of society (also called the professional role morality)

Three levels of ethical character:

  • “Child” – Acting ethically because of a fear of  punishment. (No developed internal ethical character)
  • “Adolescent” – Acting ethically to confirm to perceived group norm. (Which means can be easily persuaded by colleagues, boss,  or clients to engage in unethical practice).
  • “Adult” – Individual grasp of moral issue, personal principle. (Has internalized ethical principles and acts on basis of integrity and character more than external influence).

I’ll let people consider these for themselves. But I would say that some degree of all four motivations should be a basis for ethical behavior. And as for the levels of ethical character, I encourage all who practice PR to act like adults, and against the pressure from peers and others, be the ethical adult in the room.