Ethics in Public Relations

Essay from the year 2010 in the subject Communications - Public Relations, Advertising, Marketing, Social Media, grade: 1,3, University of Westminster, language: English, abstract: Ethics in Public Relations have emerged to one of the key topics in PR theory and research over the last decades. This is on the one hand due to the growing professionalization and institutionalization of PR, on the other hand stories of PR practitioners violating existing moral conceptions by deliberately lying to the public have been all over the media and confirmed the bad public reputation of PR as a manipulating, untrustworthy industry. Many sources even refer to the term 'public relations ethics' as an oxymoron (Parsons, 2004, p.4; Seib&Fitzpatrick, 1995, p.1), meaning that it cannot exist because of the nature of PR as a deliberately manipulating practice. Hence setting up certain ethical rules and codes of conduct should improve this public image and provide guidelines to practitioners. Thus the main question raised in this essay is: What is the purpose of professional codes of conduct? And how effective are they?