HONESTY IN MEDIA RELATIONS

Every single public relations textbook on the market today touts honesty as the cornerstone for your media relations policies. That fact would probably come as quite a revelation for most journalists I know. Indeed, the moniker ˜spin doctors , which is applied by almost everyone to public relations flacks (there's another one that has rather unpleasant implications about the ethics of those who fill those positions ”us), in itself tells a story about a less-than -honourable approach to communicating with the media and consequently with a wider public. The truth is that the name is not so far from the truth. Before you start protesting your own honesty, we need to consider that most of the dishonest things about public relations are much more subtle than the outright lie. They are so insidious that we often overlook them.

Several years ago, a PR agency in my home town issued faxes to local media outlets indicating that there ˜will likely be a major news conference at 9:30 am the following day at a ˜ location to be determined. The final teaser was to suggest that later on that day they would have further information available. It seemed an odd PR strategy even if it didn't smack of an ethical breach. There will ˜likely be a news conference? Whoever heard of sending out a news release suggesting there ˜might be a news conference, which of course also suggests that there just as easily ˜might not ?

It seemed clear that this was some kind of a ploy, a public relations stunt if you like. The release, however, was reported on in the local media, not as the issuers might have hoped, but rather under a headline that read ˜Mysterious fax sparks media's mistrust , thereby allowing the reporter to write not about whatever event the PR agency might have wanted to publicize, but about how devious PR people can be. By failing to provide details, and thus keeping the media on a string, the media were quite correct in their conclusion that this was somehow oblique and thereby perceived as shifty. This kind of PR strategy is just the kind of approach that alienates the media and plays havoc with the relationship. The development of mistrust between PR people and the media is problematic . But why is it an ethical issue?

Journalist and media trainer Ed Shiller put it this way: ˜When the media and their primary sources of information become estranged, only the truth will suffer. ^[1] It is this issue of mangling the truth of the communication that eventually reaches the public that is at the heart of the ethical problem. Clearly, when the public is not receiving honest, truthful information, then they are being wronged ”harmed. When the mistrust that often seems inherent in the relationship between PR and the media (or at least between individual reporters and individual PR practitioners ) affects the process of honest public communication, then it is a moral issue.

^[1] Shiller, E (1994) The Canadian Guide to Managing the Media , Prentice Hall Canada Ltd, Scarborough, Ontario, p 13