Every media outlet and social channel is blanketed with Presidential election coverage. This blog will give you a break from it all. We will look at ethical issues of the week that have nothing to do with elections: philotimy, racism and disclosure.
Category: This Week in PR Ethics
Total 52 Posts
With the US elections just a few days away and the divisive, negative rhetoric on all sides being at what seems to me to be an all time high, I thought this week it might make sense to take a look at the oft-overlooked virtue-based approach to ethics.
This week many of the ethics concerns for public relation and communications professionals are about disinformation, misinformation and deepfakes.
This week the most interesting ethics content came down to one theme: ideas. From new frameworks for making decisions, to new failures to consider, and new learnings from South Asia, there is something here for anyone interested in ethics.
As always, I didn’t have a problem finding PR ethics issues to highlight this week. While the limo ride is an obvious example, and one I plan to discuss in class tonight, I wanted to focus on a few other interesting stories including various forms of censorship:
The PRSA and PRCA ethics months are over. Does that mean we are going to stop discussing ethics? Heck no! That is not how we roll at EthicalVoices. Please note: this week we will not be discussing the ethics of tax returns or sharing confidential documents – others are doing that quite well. Rather I decided to build a cornucopia of the most interesting ethics stories of the past week including effective ethics training.
This week PR ethics issues revolved around the slippery ethical slope of intent. From TikTok’s social media coalition to the ethics of the Social Dilemma, media buying, and corporate donations to non-profits…there is a bit of insight for everyone. To cap it off, the PRCA has a great, free, upcoming webinar on ethics and government relations.
COVID and culture dominated the ethics headlines this week. There were articles on COVID and ethics that looked at everything from when do you share information, to the decline of trust, and the increase in pressure to act unethically. Beyond COVID, there were great articles on managing conflicts in a cancel culture environment, and a brilliant call to action to take concrete steps to end racial inequality in PR.
This week in PR ethics there was not one stand out issue (aside from the breaking COVID topics), but a number of interesting and brief reads. There were a number of examples this week reinforcing that words are not enough. Plus, with the Helsinki Conference and PRCA’s Ethics month, there were some great global perspectives on the topic.
September is Ethics Month for PRSA and PRCA. While I believe we should talk about ethics more than one month a year (one reason I created this blog and podcast), the good news is, there should be a ton a content for those that are interested. This week there are interesting articles on meaning, character and the rise of moral leaders. I also liked Tim O’Brien’s piece on ethics and AI.