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/