Is your pitching unethical?
PR pros weighed in online on whether poor media relations practices such as emailing irrelevant ideas and adding reporters to mailing lists flout the laws of morality.
Mass mailing your pitch to every journalist’s email you can get your hands on is wrongheaded—even foolish. But is it unethical?
A recent report from The Plank Center for Public Relations shared that 62% of comms pros reported facing an ethical challenge in the last year. However, what exactly that ethical dilemma might be was ill-defined.
Proper disclosure of facts to the public? Spinning bad news beyond the boundaries of fact and reason? Trying to keep internal and external stakeholder safe during a pandemic in a deeply divisive election year?
Sure, those are dilemmas. But some PR pros seem ready to extend their ethics a little farther than that.
https://twitter.com/JuliaAngelenPR/status/1414731670213709825
Others are more inclined to see ethics as a matter of working on projects that feel…ethical.
I always think of "ethical challenge" as being asked to work on something you don't feel is, well, ethical. Or communicate a message that you view as unethical. So this may not be so far from what I might imagine.
— Michelle Garrett | B2B PR Consultant/Writer (@PRisUs) July 12, 2021
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