LAWS AND ETHICS OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

ETHICS

Ethics, also known as moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice, etc.

LAWS

Law is a system of rules and guidelines, usually enforced through a set of institutions. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people.

VARIOUS LAWS AND ETHICS OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

IPRA CODE OF PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT:        Following code of conduct was adopted by the International Public Relations association at its general assembly in Venice, May 1961 and is binding on all members of the Association.

Personal and professional Integrity

Conduct Towards Clients and Employers

Conduct Towards the Public and the Media

Conduct Towards Colleagues

Personal and professional Integrity:         It is understood that by personal integrity is meant the maintenance of both high moral standards and a sound reputation. By professional integrity is meant observance of the Constitution, rules and, particularly, the code as adopted by IPRA?

Conduct Towards Clients and Employers:         

§     A member has a general duty of fair dealing towards his clients or employers, past and present.

§     A member shall not represent conflicting or competing interests without the express consent of those concerned.

§     A member shall safeguard the confidence of both present and former clients and employers.

§     A member shall not employ methods tending to be derogatory of another member’s client or employer.

§     In performing services for a client or employer a member shall not accept fees, commissions or any other valuable consideration in connection with those services from anyone other than his client or employer without the express consent of his client or employer, given after a full disclosure of the facts.

§     A member shall not propose to a prospective client or employer that his fee or other compensation be contingent on the achievement of certain results, nor shall he enter into any fee agreement to the same effect.

Conduct Towards the Public and the Media:

§     A member shall conduct his professional activities in accordance with the public interest, and with full respect for the dignity of the individual.

§     A member shall not intentionally disseminate false or misleading information.

§     A member shall not engage in any practice which tends to corrupt the integrity of channels of public communication.

§     A member shall at all times seem to give balanced and faithful representations of the organization which he serves.

§     A member shall not create and organization to serve some announced cause but actually to serve an undisclosed special or private interest of a member or his client or his employer, not shall he make use of it or any such existing organization.

Conduct Towards Colleagues

§     A member shall not intentionally injure the professional reputation or practice of another member. However, if a member has evidence that another member has been guilty of unethical, illegal or unfair practices in violation of this Code, he should present the information to the Council of IPRA.

§     A member shall not seek to supplant another member with his employer or client.

§     A member shall co-operate with fellow members in upholding and enforcing this code.

CURRENT STATE OF ETHICS IN PUBLIC RELATIONS: CODES OF ETHICS

The current state of ethics in public relations practice depends heavily on codes of ethics held by the major professional associations. Membership in these groups is voluntary, meaning that one is not required to belong to such an association in order to practice public relations. Members agree to abide by a code of ethics that is written for the entire group. Some codes of ethics are written in terms that forbid a list of certain activities; other codes of ethics espouse a set of ethical principles which should be followed. Whether written in positive or negative terms, most of the professional associations in public relations have a code of ethics.

For example, refer to the ethics codes of a few of the major public relations associations: the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management[1]  the International Public Relations Association (IPRA) Code of Athens[2] , the European Public Relations Confederation, also endorsing the Code of Athens along with its own code and the Code of Lisbon [3]the Public Relations Institute of Australia[4]  the Public Relations Society of America[5], the International Association of Business Communicators, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations  or the Arthur W. Page Society  of senior-level public relations executives.

These codes of ethics offered as examples above do not vary greatly by country but by the professional organization; some codes strive to offer guidance of a practical, professional nature toward agency practitioners (such as PRSA), while other codes attempt to identify general moral principles of ethical behavior, such as the focus on dignity, respect, and human rights, as seen in the IPRA and CERP endorsements of the Code of Athens. Professions often develop codes of ethics, and an online collection of more than 850 can be found at the Illinois Institute of Technology. That resource is a wonderful place to start if you are beginning to write or revise a code of ethics for your organization or a client. When implemented with good intent, codes of ethics can be useful tools for developing an organizational culture supporting ethical decision making. Public relations codes of ethics generally hold as cross-cultural and universal moral principles the concepts of honesty, fairness, and not harming others.

Although codes of ethics can be developed which satisfy universal conditions or principles (Kruckeberg, 1993), they have been critiqued by scholars (Parkinson, 2001; Wright, 1993) for falling short of the ideals espoused in the codes, or even in being internally contradictory. Practitioners often state that codes of ethics are too vague to be useful in their own careers or that they do not give enough specific guidance to be anything other than rudimentary (Bowen et al., 2006). Research found that some practitioners say they see a code of ethics once and then do not refer to it or read it again.

Most codes of ethics provide no enforcement monitoring or recourse for their infringement, leaving them impotent other than the occasional revocation of association membership. These problems with codes of ethics are not new and they are not limited to the field of public relations. Some scholars (Kruckeberg, 2000) of public relations argue that if practitioners are ethical then no enforcement is needed for the codes of ethics. Other scholars (Bowen, 2004a; Parkinson, 2001) go further, arguing that a simple ethics statement is all that is necessary because good intention is a more stringent guideline than a code of ethics. This debate mirrors the rationale of Plato, as quoted in Parsons (2004): “Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws”