Ethical PR Practitioners: An Urban Myth?

In an ideal world we would all think of others above all else and be ethical and happy and dancing in circles at the local park singing... we don’t! In reality acting ethically is only easy if the company you are representing is as ethical as your own personal ethics, but ethics vary so much the chances of that happening are slim to none. You’re not hired to make the world a better place, you’re hired to do a job and get results... which is why there is as much chance of meeting a truly wholly ethical practitioner as there is meeting a crocodile slithering out of your loo! Well perhaps that a teensy exaggeration, but you get the point I’m making!

Ethics are very well but at the end of the day telling the truth gets you nowhere, not when that truth is ‘we have been whipping children in sweatshops’ or ‘we don’t give a shit that the chickens your eating suffered greatly before we brutally slaughtered them’ (pardon the language but sometimes it’s justifiable). Thankfully companies are beginning to care because consumers care too, but there’s still plenty of progress to be made not just by companies but by consumers too... after all they are still both heavily influenced by the money in their pockets!

Basically these ethics which many of us hold up so high and pride ourselves in upholding can get in the way, and sometimes they have to be compromised. Something which is a fact of life, we need to earn a living and to do that we need to succeed. If faced with the prospect of losing your job our tossing your ethics aside what would you choose? If those ethics are so important to you, get out of PR or learn to disassociate your work from yourself.

What I don’t understand is how this is any different from working, or indeed shopping, at such an establishment such as KFC which is notorious for its mistreatment of chickens. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you support it by working there and helping supply it or by purchasing there and supplying demand for it... don’t use PR practitioners as scapegoats! Man up and face it, those ethics we all love so dearly aren’t worth that much! We want what we want, we keep consuming despite the consequences and we do so in our millions! The information is there for all to see, even if KFC’s PR people don’t shove it down your throats. We are individual with free will and access to the internet; if we want to know we can get to know but the plain fact is we don’t! So perhaps it is the public interest for us to not to know, and we can stop beating ourselves up about those poor chickens... or maybe we need to know! Do I sound indecisive? Well the public are fickle what can I say!? They are walking contradictions, saying one thing and buying another!

I’ll go eat my free-range eggs now while defrosting my tortured chicken breasts...

PR: It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it!