Ethics and the Profession: The Crystallizing of Public Relations Practice from Association to Accreditation, 1936–1964
Vol. 35, No. 2, 2018
By Nicholas Browning, University of Indiana
Public relations scholars continue to debate whether the field has achieved professional status, as definitions of the practice vary widely and enforcement of basic values remains difficult without any formal licensure. However, between 1936 and 1964, public relations achieved many common markers a true profession: behavioral standards of practice, active professional associations, specialized skills, collegiate coursework, and an ethical code.
The proposed link between the process of professionalization and a development of ethical values was of greatest interest in this study. The manner in which public relations was practiced during the era of professionalization should reflect the core ethical principles at play in the field at the time, perhaps shedding light not only on foundational elements of the practice, but also informing us as to what should be codified as ethical practice today.
The analysis of publicly delivered speeches by practitioners active in the field, as well as others who worked alongside public relations professionals, revealed several key elements of the practice and its ethics.
Two-way communication tactics became more prominent during this era because they were seen as an effective way to manage publics to the benefit of organizations; hence, the practice was largely asymmetric in nature as well. As such, practitioners active during the interwar and postwar years viewed persuasion as a core element of public relations and appeared to have few ethical concerns about its value, though discomfort regarding the ethicality of persuasion would later emerge in the public relations scholarship, beginning mostly in the 1980s.
Though loyalty to one’s employers and strong advocacy on their behalf was greatly valued by practitioners or the era, larger concerns also began to arise. Practitioners repeatedly asserted that truthful and accurate communication was a critical element of effective and ethical practice. Additionally, proto-corporate social responsibility efforts and other aspects of stakeholder engagement began to emerge, though arguably less so because such efforts advanced societal interest than because they were seen as useful tactics to bolster the clients’ reputations.
Exercise 1
Investigating and later conceptualizing the moral concerns of public relations practice is a difficult task for numerous reasons, not the least of which being that, for some, the very notion of public relations ethics appears oxymoronic. Therefore, any discussion of public relations ethics – whether in historical or present terms – might benefit from beginning by taking a step back to reflect on common views regarding the field.
Questions:
Take a moment to think about the public relations profession. What comes to mind when you hear the term PR? How, where, and when do you hear the term discussed? Who do you envision when you think of a public relations practitioner? What does he or she do?
Odds are your early perceptions of the practice reflected the contexts in which it was discussed through various media channels, which tend to portray public relations negatively. In analyzing representations of public relations in film and fiction from 1930 to 1995, Dr. Karen Miller found that of the 202 different public relations practicing characters selected for study, only 24 were portrayed as honest when confronted with a moral decision. She summarizes her finding as follows:
Positive portrayals of accomplished practitioners – professionals – are available, but they are far from prevalent. Antisocial characteristics such as alcohol abuse, promiscuity, and especially lying are connected with the practice of PR so regularly as to seem normal. Practitioners are usually depicted as skilled in the sense that they are effective, but they are also often cynical, greedy, isolated, unfulfilled, obsequious, manipulative, or intellectual lightweights. (p. 23)
Questions:
How closely does this depiction match your image of public relations? Is this portrayal fair? Why or why not? Consider your opinion of other professions and how they match either positive or negative portrayals in popular media? What does this say about the agenda-setting power of media as it relates to our understanding of professions? What could professionals in the more vilified fields do to improve their reputations and the image of their fields on the whole?
Further Reading
Miller, Karen S. “Public Relations in Film and Fiction: 1930 to 1995.” Journal of Public Relations Research 11, no. 1 (1999): 3-28.
Exercise 2
Among the major ethical struggles with which PR practitioners contend is balancing loyalties to the client with those responsibilities to various organizational stakeholders. In this piece, you read how practitioners of the era were firmly committed to the organization for which they worked – so much so that many felt they hadn’t done enough to protect American businesses during the Depression years. Among the louder, regretful voices was Ed Lipscomb, who made the following comment during a speech at a gathering of practitioners in Washington, D.C., in 1952, while he was serving as president of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA):
Under our very noses a confiscatory tax of 82 percent on corporate earnings is universally looked upon as a legitimate levy on the ‘excess profits’ of would-be profiteers. Political pensions are welcomed as ‘social security.’ Reactionaries who would take us back to public policies which brought the downfall of Solomon’s kingdom and have wrecked every country that has pursued them since, are today identified as ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive;’ and those who support the most progressive constitution and declaration of personal independence this earth has ever known are referred to as ‘reactionaries.’ We have not done what we could. (p. 149)
Consider this quote in the context of PRSA’s Code of Ethics. The organization first adopted a code of ethics in 1950, but it was not until 1988 that the code directly referenced PR professionals’ dual obligations to both employers as well as the public interest. The current code clearly states that the practitioners should “serve the public good”; “adhere to the highest standards of accuracy in advancing the interests of those [whom professionals] represent and in communicating with the public”; and be “faithful to those [whom professionals] represent, while honoring [a professional’s] obligation to serve the public interest.”
Discussion Questions
- Do (or should) public relations practitioners have obligations beyond simply serving the interests of their clients? If so, what are they? And to whom should they be responsible?
- Imagine a scenario in which obligations to a client and to a public (e.g., consumers, employees, community groups) directly conflict. Should the client or public interest come first? Why or why not? Or would that depend on a variety of other factors? What might those factors be?
- How might practitioners solve dilemmas in which client and public interests are at odds?
Further Reading
Fitzpatrick, Kathy R. “Evolving Standards in Public Relations: A Historical Examination of Prsa’s Codes of Ethics.” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 17, no. 2 (2002): 89-110.
Lipscomb, Ed. “Let’s Get Lost: So Shall We Find Ourselves.” Vital Speeches of the Day 19, no. 5 (1952): 147-50.
Public Relations Society of America. “Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Member Code of Ethics.” PRSA Website (2018). https://www.prsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/PRSACodeofEthics.pdf.
Exercise 3
One of the main goals of this piece was to determine what constituted ethical public relations practice during this period of professionalization. The author described certain values and practices, such as accepting wider responsibility to stakeholders and committing to truth-telling, as ethical – but he never explained why those practices were ethical.
While there are numerous reasons why a given action might be seen as moral, you probably consider actions to be good if they follow some moral principle or advance some moral end. Oftentimes different ethical rationales would advise the same moral action. Consider the case of truth and lies. A rules-based approach might argue that honesty is intrinsically good as it signifies respect for others and that, generally, if we all told the truth society would be more harmonious. A consequence-based approach might draw the same conclusion that honesty is good, but instead by reasoning that if parties are upfront with one another, things may work out better in the long run for all involved.
Still, there are instances in which applying different ethical approaches would lead people to evaluate the same or similar actions as morally inequivalent. Consider, for instance, the work done on behalf of tobacco companies by two prominent public relations practitioners, Edward L. Bernays and John W. Hill.
In the 1920s, American Tobacco Company CEO George Washington Hill worried he was losing out on half his potential cigarette customers because it was taboo for women to smoke in public. Working for American Tobacco, Bernays engineered a pseudoevent, the “Torches of Freedom” march. In New York City’s 1929 Easter Parade, Bernays recruited a select group of fashionable women to light up their “torches of freedom” in protest of the social taboo against women smoking in public. Of course industry interest in this particular women’s right had more to do with increasing cigarette sales than gender equality.
Evidence regarding the health risks of cigarette smoking wasn’t prevalent until the 1950s. John W. Hill’s firm, Hill and Knowlton, worked with several cigarette manufacturers to respond to mounting medical studies connecting smoking to cancer and heart disease. In 1953, H&K helped found the Tobacco Industry Research Committee. Rather than directly insisting that smoking was not hazardous, TIRC combatted smoking-is-bad-for-you research with a science-is-not-in-yet argument. In essence, TIRC created a second side to a debate that didn’t truly exist, worked to include that frame of inconclusiveness into news coverage, in in so doing sowed enough doubt to keep many smokers smoking. H&K resigned the tobacco industry account in 1969.
Discussion Questions
- What makes an action ethical?
- Looking at Bernays and Hill’s campaign, were either ethical? Why or why not? Did one strike you as less ethical in his actions than the other? Why?
- Historians often worry about presentism, or the application of present-day standards in evaluating past events. Why might this concern be particularly prevalent in historical studies of ethics?
Further Reading
Browning, Nicholas. “The Ethics of Two-Way Symmetry and the Dilemmas of Dialogic Kantianism.” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 30, no. 3 (2015): 1-18.
Cutlip, Scott M. The Unseen Power: Publice Relations, a History. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994.
Miller, Karen S. The Voice of Business: Hill & Knowlton and Postwar Public Relations. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
Murphree, Vanessa. “Edward Bernays’s 1929 “Torches of Freedom” March: Myths and Historical Significance.” American Journalism 32, no. 3 (2015): 258-81.