Ethics is a common term often used in PR, that is to say today organizations are striving to get the meaning of what is right and wrong and the only ability to differentiate that is through understanding code of ethics. For the organization to be competitive and be more recognized it has to be driven by ethical values and for it to prosper it has to abide by code of ethics. Ethics could bring long lasting relations between an organization and its staff as well as its key publics.
Public Relations practitioners help in maintaining and establishing mutual lines of communication between organization and its key publics. PR involves management of problems or issues and it uses ethical communication as its tool to build relationship between an organization and its key publics. Despite the effort of implementing ethical codes, the public still view PR practitioners as spin doctors; they associate pr with unethical practices that include: giving out misleading information on products, failure to give information especially during crises, giving false information in news releases e.t.c.. It can be argued that the perception that the public still hold about PR is caused by what happened in the early years of the profession and this prevents the society to see the revolution that has been taking place recently.
To my experience when working with jo’ish concepts i will say that organisations have started to take the issue of ethical practices into consideration. Like other organizations Jo’ish Concepts have created and pasted acceptable ethical codes within the work place and when ever somebody is believed to have behaved unethically they issue is addressed during morning meetings or afternoon meetings. Addressing unacceptable behavior during meetings is a strategy that jo’ish concepts believes helps highlight seriousness in behaving in an acceptable behavior within and outside the organization especially that the organization is new therefore striving at building a good image in order to get loyalty from its sponsors and key publics.
The fact that pr is associated with unethical behaviors does not give people an opportunity to label the profession as unethical and neither should it give pr professionals mentality that they should manipulate and mislead people.
The discussion today is... Do you think that ETHICS exist in the context of PUBLIC RELATIONS or the profession is all about manipulation, persuasion and propaganda? Relate the answers to your experiences during internship.
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