My pal Bob Batchelor, once upon a time a professor and before that, like me a PR guy, used to give a lecture with the same title as this post.
You can find it in pieces on YouTube, and as summer begins to fade and the return to campus is showing on the horizon, I think of that lecture and the discussions Bob and I have had about it.
Like any set of tools, the strategies and tactics or public relations can be used neutrally, for objectively good aims and for objectively bad aims. I once wrote a post averring that political PR comes closest to actual evil, because in that application of our craft, openly lying is often expected and commonplace.
As much of a committed free marketer and even capitalist I am, though, the tendency to use strategic communication tactics for harmful means seems to be on the rise. In crisis communication, we often coach execs to parry direct questions and answer the ones we prefer to answer. That’s the tactic of “Let me just say this about that…” and hijacking the questioner in the direction we want to go.
Lawyers have nothing on PRs when it comes to that strategy!
So where does that leave our practice, our profession, if you will? I run an academic program designed to build senior-level professional communicators, people prepared to lead teams in agencies and in organizations. Do we teach them this type of work?
We have codes of ethics in advertising, marketing, public relations and other forms of professional comms that are allegedly there to rein in our worst impulses. There is not much of an enforcement mechanism in this codes, however.
What do you think? Are we just engaged in a campaign of deception, heedless of our responsibilities to people, society and our clients? Or is the latter constituency the only one that counts?
Discuss.
