By Greg Hazley
PR pros who counsel senior management on ethics issues see a duty to the public interest, not just the organization they serve, a role which can have repercussions, according to research by professors at Baylor Univ. and the Univ. of Texas at Austin.
The “’yes man’ has no value, no value whatsoever in PR,” said one of 30 veteran PR execs who participated in the study.
Marlene Neill, a Ph.D. and lecturer on journalism, PR and new media at Baylor, and Minette Drumwright, Ph.D. and assoc. professor of advertising at UT, interviewed 30 PR pros in the U.S. and Australia with an average of 27 years of experience in the field for the report. They spanned corporations, non-profits, government entities, and PR agencies.
Neill said participants acknowledged that they were often in the “kill the messenger” situation, making it difficult to make a case to or criticize executives above them. A few said they were fired or demoted for refusing to do something “blatantly unethical,” while two said they resigned when their advice went unheeded, include one exec who refused to put false information in a press release.
As one study participant noted: ““I can’t afford to lose my credibility. …As PR professionals, it’s all we have. And if I lose my credibility here, it’s not like I can just go start over with someone else, somewhere else.”
While PR’s migration to marketing has broadened the field, it has also had consquences, according to the research. PR pros noted a common misperception among senior executives that PR is simply a tool of the marketing department, limiting its role in strategic counsel at a company or organization.
Two approaches cited for communicating with management without seeming judgmental were mock news conferences and the “headline test,” where managers are asked to imagine a good headline and a bad headline that could result from an approach they championed.
The study has been published in the Journal of Mass Media Ethics. |