This week on EthicalVoices, Dick Martin, the retired Chief Communication Officer for AT&T and Chairman of the Board of the PR Museum, discusses a number of important ethics issues, including:
- How a single racist cartoon exposed deeper organizational issues and sparked meaningful change
- Why telling the truth in PR isn’t always easy
- Why strong ethics requires more than good intentions
- Why you should be careful about getting too clever
I gave a brief overview, but why don’t you tell our listeners more about your career?
I’ve always thought of myself as a writer. In fact, I majored in philosophy in college. Not seeing many help wanted ads for philosophers, I decided to maybe write for television or film.
So, I got a master’s degree at BU in broadcasting and film. I had an opportunity to interview with the Gannett chain of newspapers and television stations – but I didn’t want to go to that interview cold without ever having been to an interview. So, I looked at the list of all the companies that were recruiting that week and chose the one I would least like to work for, which was Western Electric at a factory in Omaha, Nebraska.
I went to the interview, and it went so well that they offered me a free trip to New York to be interviewed by the higher ups. I’d never been to New York, so I decided to take them up on it and went. I had the interview, and they offered me a job that paid $3,000 more than the next best job I was being offered.
I spoke with my wife about it. We decided we’d give it 18 months. We moved to New York and started working there. One thing led to another, and before you know it, I’d been there 33 years and I was now the head of public relations for AT&T. Eventually, in 2003 I had an opportunity to retire because the CEO I was working for retired.
I started a writing career. I wrote an article with the Harvard Business Review, which led to a book, which led to more books, more articles, and I still feel like a writer, basically.
Thinking back over your career and 33 years at AT&T, what is the most difficult ethical challenge you ever faced?
I’ll give you two. One is an ethical challenge I didn’t face. I was never asked to lie by anybody at AT&T in 33 years. None of my bosses ever suggested I should lie, but I had trouble finding the truth. Because the truth was hidden all across the company and jealously guarded by various people.
I had to dig really hard to find the truth. And I guess that’s an ethical dilemma because in public relations you want to tell the truth. That was one thing.
Another one was much, much more serious. Back in the early nineties, before email was all that available or popular, we were still printing a company magazine and sending it to people’s homes.
It was a very popular magazine, because the editors were free from censorship in the sense of the company telling them, you can’t print this because it says bad things about us, or it criticizes us. So, employees saw it as a really useful thing to read, and they read it unlike most employee magazines. The situation developed where they had to strike a piece from the inside back page of the magazine because they were still working on research.
So, they substituted a cartoon that was AT&T Around the World, and Can you guess how many people we have working here, there, or the other place? The illustration for the article was done by an outside company that actually designed the magazine. They hired a cartoonist to do an illustration which they faxed to the production manager on a Friday afternoon.
It was a miserable fax, but it looked okay to her, so she approved it. The magazine was published and when the editor came into the office on Monday morning and opened it up, she was aghast because there was a clearly racist cartoon on the inside back cover. The cartoonist had drawn a picture of the globe, and he had people in every country dressed in the local folkloric costumes, like wooden shoes in the Netherlands and so forth. But in Africa, he had a gorilla on the phone. This was the racist trope that was so obvious that the editor was very upset, and she ran around to other people, including people of color, and asked was she exaggerating the problem?
They all told her, no, it is a problem. It’s going to offend a lot of people.
So, she immediately sent out an apology to everybody, which of course was an invitation to go look at the cartoon on the inside of the back cover because we’re sorry it was printed. And it just blew up into an incredibly divisive event.
People of color within AT&T were more than offended. It ignited their disappointment with the company that more people of color hadn’t been promoted into higher positions. In fact, AT&T had a very good record in terms of diversity hiring. Even when it did downsizing, it maintained the same proportion of people of color, but there weren’t many people at the officer level or higher.
But we thought we could explain this. The production manager was a woman of color. We never would’ve published that cartoon if we’d actually seen it, but it was just a black blob. I was pretty convinced people knew our record, were going to give us the benefit of the doubt and they’re going to forgive us.
They didn’t, and it rolled on for a couple of weeks until I finally realized – because I’d spoken to so many people in the organization who were people of color – I finally realized that we could explain this, but there was no excuse for it.
It just compounded the resentment and the anger that a lot of employees felt. Finally, we had to close the magazine. It had lost all credibility, but more importantly, the company began a new program to accelerate the number of people of color who rose in the organization.
Things eventually settled down. But my ethical problem was not really understanding the harm that we had caused. It might have been a total accident. But we had really hurt a lot of people because of that. And it wasn’t until I realized that, were we able to address the problem.
What’s the advice you can give to other communications professionals that don’t have that worldview, that don’t have that experience? How can you make sure you can understand or bring those views in to avoid causing harm?
We can all be better at listening. We need to have fluent listening in all corners of the organization. The lesson I learned was that I needed to get out of my office more and interact with regular employees a lot more than I did at all levels.
I began doing that, but we also had employee resource groups I hadn’t spent much time with those groups except for one, I have an adopted child who was Asian and I became very active with the Asian employee resource group, but I didn’t have a relationship with the others, with the Hispanic or the African American groups or L-G-B-T-Q for that matter.
I’m very disappointed that some companies are cutting back on employee resource groups. They tend to think of it as a tool to help people of color or people of different sexual orientation communicate with each other and explain how things work and help them along. And it does do that.
But more importantly, if it’s done correctly, it’ll give the organization insight into what people are really feeling and thinking. And it’d be a shame if we lose that.
I agree, and I think it’s so important. It’s understanding diverse perspectives and bringing diverse perspectives to your team.
AT&T is an amazing organization, has been for a long time, but it sounds like in this case there weren’t some checks and balances.
Yeah. I don’t blame the production manager. The real perpetrator here was those of us higher in the organization who should have realized from the get-go what the real problem was. It wasn’t the cartoon.
The cartoon was simply an excuse that revealed how people were really feeling and thinking. From the very beginning, we should have said we’ve really got a problem and we’re going to implement the diversity program that we ultimately implemented three weeks later.
That makes sense. I want to circle back a little bit to the hidden truth that was jealously guarded. I was talking to Lou Capozzi a while ago and he faced a similar situation where plant managers were hiding potential health and safety hazards from him. He had to really go digging to find out and take action because the plant managers didn’t want to seem to be neglectful.
How do you recommend people dig for the truth when folks in their organization aren’t trying to share it?
I only had the one corporation I worked for, so I hesitate to make a generalization. But my impression is that any large organization has pockets of secrecy. The CEO likes to think that he or she knows exactly what’s going on everywhere in the company, but they don’t. They’re just too many levels. And if we’re going to put something in a news release, we have to be absolutely sure that it’s true and accurate and not fudged. I learned over the years to cross-examine the information I was given and to find multiple sources for it.
It didn’t always work by the way. There was one instance where… this is going to be complicated because it concerns something that doesn’t exist anymore. Remember long distance calling? When you had to pay 25 cents a minute to make a call to San Francisco or something like that? The company at one point decided that it was going to institute a minimum charge.
Whether you made a long-distance phone call or not, we still had to send you a bill saying you didn’t owe us anything. So, we instituted a, I think it was a $3 a month charge. Nobody liked it. Everybody hated it. The FCC particularly hated it, but they let us do it.
Eventually, somebody said, listen, we don’t have to add a $3 charge to everybody’s bill. Why don’t we just raise the cost per minute by a penny? Then we can eliminate the minimum charge. And everybody said, that makes sense. Let’s do that.
The FCC asked us not to announce both moves at the same time. Not to say we’re getting rid of the minimum charge, but we’re going to raise the rate by a penny. I don’t know why they said that, but they said it. The general counsel who was responsible for government relations convinced the head of the consumer long distance business that they ought to issue two press releases.
One release announcing they’re getting rid of the minimum charge and crediting the FCC for doing it. And then a couple of weeks later we’re raising the cost of a call by a penny. I argued against it, but the head of government affairs felt the FCC needed a win, and this is going to look like a win for them.
So that’s what we did. We got headlines saying we’ve eliminated the minimum charge, a big win for the FCC, then two weeks later, we issued a news release saying that we’d raised the price of making a long-distance call by a penny.
A sharp reporter at the New York Times put those two announcements together and he did a front-page story about it that made us look like thieves, or at least less than honest.
I had a meeting in the CEO’s office with the heads of consumer long distance. He wanted to know how this happened. I was just about to say that I had warned against it when the general counsel said Martin told us not to do it this way. We felt we had to because of our relationship with the FCC. Y
You don’t win ’em all. But you have to try.
What are you seeing as some of the key ethics challenges facing the industry today?
Artificial intelligence, deep data mining, and the development of new algorithms is going to change everything.
Back in the mid-nineties, we said the internet is going to change everything. And people thought that was an exaggeration. Turned out not to be an exaggeration, although it took a few decades to realize that.
AI is going to change everything. We have to think through the ethical implications of how we use artificial intelligence and algorithms in the practice of public relations. We have to start from the perspective of doing no harm and really understanding how we could harm people through the faulty application of artificial intelligence, how we could invade people’s privacy, how we could build bias into the algorithms that we use which would be ultimately unfair to a lot of people.
We have to be careful that we don’t personalize communication so much that it passes the line of being creepy and becomes a real invasion of people’s privacy. And that’s going to be hard to do. I have to admit, I am not fully aware of all of the capabilities of artificial intelligence, although I do know that AI has hallucinations and it shows up in your search results.
If it shows up in a news release or in a social post or in some kind of content we’ve created it’s not only going to be embarrassing, it could be very harmful.
I agree. It’s definitely going to be transformative. I think even more so than the internet because it’s going to change everything, including operations, communications, and it’s going to give a level of personalization we haven’t seen. And it’s also a greater invasion of privacy. All the data that we’re going to have, how do we ethically use it? It’s going to be a big challenge.
The PR Council has issued some useful guidelines that remind you to respect people’s agency. Don’t use AI in a way that either intimidates people or manipulates them. The guidelines also address transparency and accountability. We really have to think of a heart about all of this and I’m not sure we’re doing that yet.
Since I co-led the development of those guidelines, I think they’re pretty great too.
What is the best piece of ethics advice you were ever given?
That comes in two parts as well. When I first joined the company, I attended a briefing run by one of the factory managers. He told us there were two ways to become a Western Electric executive.
One was to work hard, get results, be a team player, the other was to do something so bad that it made the newspapers, because the newspaper article would identify us as a Western Electric executive no matter what our level was. That turned out to be pretty good ethical advice.
For a good part of my career, I always asked myself would I want this to appear on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or The Washington Post? It’s a silly way of asking an ethical question, but it turns out it’s fairly effective.
The other piece of advice I received was from my former boss whose role as Chief Communications Officer, I succeeded – Marilyn Laurie. After she retired, she gave us all some good advice if you’re working not on the agency side, but on the client side.
She said, you have to know the business as well as the people who are running it. But you have to know the outside world better than they do. She said the first will give you credibility. The second will give you value. Because if you can go into a senior meeting and tell people how what they’re considering to do, or policy they’re considering to set, how it will be interpreted by the outside world – you are bringing value to the conversation.
The thing I learned as I rose through the ranks AT&T in public relations was that writing, which was my first love, was the ticket of entry. But when you get up a few levels you’re no longer expected to tell your internal clients what to say. You’re expected to do more than that.
You’re expected to help them decide what to do, rhetoric won’t cut it. Coming up with a snappy slogan is not what they need. What they need is somebody who can tell them how the outside world is going to see what they propose to do. What the reaction is likely to be, and how they could either change what they’re planning to do or what steps they could take to try to make it more palatable to the outside world.
To me that’s ethics. That’s making a real ethical contribution to your clients.
Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you wanted to highlight?
Since I’m chair of the Public Relations Museum Board of Trustees. I’d love for you to ask why we have a PR Museum.
Why do we have a PR Museum?
It’s related to ethics actually, because by studying what public relations people have done in the past, we can learn a lot about true ethical values. And how to resolve ethical dilemmas.
I’m a great believer in history. You really do learn a lot from history. But most importantly if you don’t remember what’s happened in the past, you risk repeating it all over again. That’s why I’m in that job.
I love the PR museum. I was there when I was at Baruch College – now it is at PRSA’s headquarters sharing space. But tell us more. If people want to visit it or engage in the programming, how can they check it out?
They can check it out online@prmuseum.org org. The museum accepts visitors only by appointment because every visit is curated to the people visiting.
So, if you have a great interest in Edward Bernays, they’ll haul out all the Edward Bernays stuff they have, and you’ll actually be able to look through his correspondence with famous people and his books and notes. We have oral histories that we recorded with him. Same goes for Ivy Lee, Harold Burson, Dan Edelman, a long list of prominent figures in public relations.
Are there any hidden gems that you really like in the Museum?
Yes. There’s a letter that Harold Burson wrote to a friend just before he was discharged from the Army. In that letter he explained that he was not going to go back to work for the engineering company he had been doing public relations for, but he was going to stay in New York and start a PR agency that was going to focus on business-to-business public relations, which as far as he could tell, wasn’t being done by anybody else and wasn’t even of interest to the larger PR agencies. And just, it is just a fascinating letter. It’s handwritten, obviously. But to see how Harold at that young age, he was still in his twenties, I think at that point was thinking that far ahead and he did it.
The proof is in the pudding and the pudding is here. We can see Burson is now one of the larger PR agencies.
Listen to the entire interview, with bonus content here
- Lessons from a PR Legend: Dick Martin on Ethics, Accountability, and Finding the Hard Truths - August 4, 2025
- Fighting Mosquitoes and Misinformation: Ethics in the Public Health Trenches - July 7, 2025
- How to Effectively Address Management Decisions that Conflict with Your Values – Carolyn Smith Casertano - May 27, 2025
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