PR Ethics

No matter your pay grade, if you make $10 per hour or $500 per hour, if you are a CEO or a cashier, ethics is paramount when making your everyday decisions on the job. That being said, it is of greater priority to a Public Relations practitioner to do his/her job well for the sake of the company. I would say that the top two rules for a PR practitioner would be 1. Develop your own system of ethics branching, but not straying, from the guidelines of the PRSA ethics code. 2. Make the company look as appealing as possible to the audience. If one always supersedes two, then you should have no problem doing your job, and doing it to the best of your ability. In class wednesday, when we talked about omitting information about the company, I had a few thoughts. What was the information? If it was info about the company’s financial situation that might cause them to go bankrupt, then it would be deplorable to omit it. The PR practitioner, however, has to try to spin it to make it look as mundane as possible. If he went out and said “Yeah, this looks bad, really, really bad”, then termination would be in line, and he would be branded as disloyal and have a hard time finding work elsewhere. Lobbyists in Washington to this everyday; they make a positive out of a negative and to a certain extent that is a great trait to have. What I am trying to say is, sure there are ethics codes, some rules more important than others, but when push comes to shove and you have to bend (not break) a rule to keep living in a house, driving a car, and eating food, if you don’t get the job done someone else will.

http://www.prsa.org/AboutPRSA/Ethics/

http://aboutpublicrelations.net/aa052701a.htm

http://www.pr-squared.com/index.php/2010/01/tweeting-under-false-circumstances-social-media-ethical-dilemmas

Myths about PR

The first item is both a myth and a preconception. It is that women dominate the field of PR because they are better at it. Certainly it is true that some women are better than men in this field, and others too. In class we said that women are drawn to this field because they are more sociable than men, and better listeners, and communicators, but I think that is a broad generalization and that it is more of a case by case basis. My theory is that certain jobs are geared toward men, and with more and more women in the workforce, PR happened to appeal to women and became a field in which they could thrive. Women have started to infiltrate other job fields in recent years including the police force and millwrights, both of which had over a 300% increase when the study was published (link 1). Judging by this data and the fact that there are more women working today than in past years, maybe the PR field will even out, or at least move in that direction, as civil engineers and auto mechanics have. Another myth is that PR is not really a profession. From what I have gathered about it, PR people have to do a lot of off hours work in addition to all of the planning that goes into their on the clock work. A PR professional has to know what the people want to see, and that may differ on a week to week, or even day to day basis. I look forward to learning more about the profession which I think will be constantly changing in what it entails and how to go about doing it.

http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/censusandstatistics/a/menwomenjobs.htm

http://www.bls.gov/opub/working/page3a.htm (an in depth article that I found very useful, You can’t argue with the logic here)

http://www.economist.com/node/15174418