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Even without us realising it, every one of us would have used some form of PR or public relations during the course of our daily lives. It can come in the form of telling someone she's pretty even when you feel otherwise - perhaps because you do not wish to hurt her feelings or for the fear of getting a punch in the nose. It may be in the form of crafting a valid reason for why you're late for school when in actual fact, you overslept. Or it could be that time when you sincerely apologised to someone after making a mistake and meaning every single word of it.
As you might have noticed, two out of the three everyday examples that I gave above are not exactly what some would call ethical.
Which brings me to one of the issues that was brought up during today's lesson - the question of public relations and ethics. I feel that ethics play an extremely important part of public relations. While it is true that one of the purposes of PR is to maintain and portray a positive image of an organisation, I feel that this objective should not overrule what is right and wrong. Of course, "right" and "wrong" in this case are defined by laws and the expectations of society itself.
This reminded me of something I studied in one of my previous courses, IRHR1001 - Managing the Organisation.
A certain viewpoint regarding ethics is that the only corporate-social responsibility of an organisation is to make profits. I believe that corporate-social responsibilities (CSR) is closely linked to PR when it comes to managing companies. Well, questions and debates like this are making me look forward to whatever we will be studying in the next few weeks. Public relations is indeed less dull than I had initially perceived.
In all honesty, getting my head off my beloved pillow on this cold and rainy morning was one of the hardest challenges I have ever faced in my entire life (okaaay, not really). Well, after today's rather interesting introduction, having to drag myself out of bed this morning suddenly didn't seem like such a bad thing anymore.
Interesting way of putting in the concept of corporate social responsibility. Wouldn't you agree that media itself, by nature, springs from something unethical? That is, assuming that people recognizes the mask of ethical behavior that the media promises. And the role of a PR practitioner is to manipulate it.
ReplyDelete'ethical' standards have become increasingly diluted, no one can for sure pin point when or where anyone/anything crossed the barrier of ethical vs unethical.
And yes, I do agree this module's going to be a motivation to separate the ear and the pillow every tuesday. :)
Well, the question of whether the mass media is "ethical" or not is something that can be heavily discussed and debated upon. My point of view is that media is not something that can be generalised as a whole.
ReplyDeleteWhether certain media content is within ethical boundaries or not depends on the producer of the content or maybe even the controller of the medium, but NOT the media itself.
So while I agree that the mass media in general is not exactly a "pure" media, I don't believe that it "springs from something unethical", as you have mentioned.