THE CONTROLLED LEXICON


THE ˜CONTROLLED LEXICON

Public relations practitioners are often geniuses in this domain. We create specific messages to target specific publics and choose our words carefully . None of this is inherently problematic from a moral standpoint, but when the control of the allowable vocabulary results in obfuscation of the truth, this is when potential ethical problems arise.

Consider the situation described by authors Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber in their recent book Trust Us, We're Experts: How industry manipulates science and gambles with your future . They tell the story of a November 1996 presentation at a PR conference by a PR executive, one of whose assignments involved managing the image of Nutrasweet TM , Monsanto's artificial sweetener.

According to Rampton and Stauber, this PR executive described a PR strategy that recognized that words such as ˜artificial (as in artificial sweetener, which even the company says it is) suggested negative images to consumers and set about removing them from all references to the product. He is quoted by Rampton and Stauber as saying, ˜Words such as "substitute," "artificial," "chemical," "laboratory," "scientist" were removed forever from our lexicon and replaced with words such as " discovered ," "choice," "variety," "unique," "different", "new taste". [ 6]

Are any of these words immoral in themselves ? Of course not, but when you examine the situation in this kind of black and white way, it's not hard to understand why consumers have a difficult time trusting manufacturers and their PR campaigns .

[ 6] Rampton, S and Stauber, J (2001) Trust Us, We're Experts: How industry manipulates science and gambles with your future , Jeremy P Tarcher, New York, pp 65-66




Ethics in Public Relations. A Guide to Best Practice
Ethics in Public Relations: A Guide to Best Practice (PR in Practice)
ISBN: 074945332X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 165

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