Randal Marlin

by Propaganda

  9/5/13 4:52 PM

  passed on voluntarily to the media, and to “intervene in the reporting process in a manner that has a reasonable chance of influencing the reporting outcome in known

  ways.”21

  The philosophy expressed in O’Malley’s thinking may have affected a change in

  the CPRS Code. The following provision from a previous code was dropped around

  1993: “a) A member shall act primarily in the public interest in the practice of public

  relations and shall neither act nor induce others to act in a way which may affect unfa-

  vorably the practice of public relations, the community, or the Society....” However,

  the code available on the CPRS website in April 2012 states that “Members shall con-

  duct their professional lives in a manner that does not conflict with the public interest

  and the dignity of the individual, with respect for the rights of the public as contained

  in the Constitution of Canada and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”22

  It hardly needs stating that any attempt at secrecy must itself be kept secret or the

  policy of information restraint will backfire and give the institution an even worse pub-

  lic profile. In 1988, there were calls for resumption of international boycotting activity

  against Nestlé in the light of accusations that the company once again was distributing

  free formula to clinics and hospitals in developing countries. When the PR firm Ogilvy

  and Mather gave advice to Nestlé to discourage media attention, the report containing

  the advice somehow was leaked to the press, with consequent negative publicity. The

  advice was to engage in the strategy of “pro-active neutralization” and to monitor grass

  roots activities:

  As always, the media have the potential to exacerbate the issue, create much greater

  awareness than desired, and continuously find negative in either neutral or positive

  news.

  In light of this, Ogilvy & Mather recommends that as a general rule Nestlé

  should be reactive regarding boycott materials and not initiate media communica-

  tions. If the media ask questions or want a story, Nestlé representatives should judge

  and respond accordingly—not initiate. This avoids generating more awareness of

  the issue.

  The same report also advised Nestlé to help “inoculate” against bad publicity by engag-

  ing in a positive “do good” public service campaign to give Carnation (a Nestlé sub-

  sidiary that markets infant formula) a good image. For this, the report recommended

  “Carnation Care” (foster care for HIV-infected children and infants).23

  A similar boomerang hit Ontario Hydro in 1990 following brownouts that

  occurred around Christmas 1988. Somehow, the Energy Probe Research Foundation

  obtained a copy of a report prepared by Goldfarb Consultants and presented to

  Ontario Hydro officials earlier that year. In a newsletter, Norman Rubin, the founda-

  tion’s director of nuclear research, detailed some of the advice in the report. The public

  was reluctant, it said, to go along with a $200 billion power expansion plan calling

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  for, among other things, 14 Darlington-sized nuclear reactors. The report noted that it would be difficult to convince the public of the need for the expansion if there were

  few or no brownouts and blackouts. Three months later, Hydro began to experience

  brownouts in parts of the province. “This year,” wrote Rubin, “over a period of several

  months, Hydro denied repeatedly that this report existed, even though Hydro was

  required by law to divulge it at Ontario Energy Board hearings.”24

  Without commenting on the correctness or otherwise of Mr. Rubin’s assess-

  ment of the legal requirements on Ontario Hydro regarding the report’s contents,

  the incident does suggest one very important ethical restriction on a PR strategy in

  which secrecy is vital. If the necessity for secrecy conflicts with legal requirements to

  divulge the secret matter, it is unethical to violate those legal requirements. Since it is

  unethical to sustain the strategy of secrecy under those circumstances, it sets the stage

  for a PR disaster if such a strategy were adopted. Perhaps a calculated risk might be

  taken that illegal suppression of the document would never be discovered. Breaking

  the law is not normally a good ethical practice, but in this case doing so violates the

  whole spirit of democracy. The law exists for the purpose of allowing the public to

  know what is happening in vital matters affecting the public interest. Suppression of

  the reports defies that principle. So from an ethical point of view, sound PR advice

  should be against embarking on such a strategy. But even from a practical standpoint,

  the huge downside risk of discovery could be expected to offset predicted gains even

  if there is a fair likelihood of maintaining secrecy. This is especially true in a post-

  WikiLeaks era when anonymous whistle blowers may proliferate.

  Earlier, we mentioned Bok’s criterion of publicity in connection with assessing

  the ethics of lying. The same test can be usefully applied, with some qualifications,

  to a PR strategy. How would it look if the strategy became publicized? If the public

  resents being manipulated, it is likely that the strategy is wrong. However, we have

  seen Whately’s argument, in the light of which not all deceptions are necessarily

  wrong; that kind of reasoning can apply here as well.

  Ivy Lee and the Ethics of Public Relations

  It is notable that one of the earliest and most successful practitioners of pub-

  lic relations, Ivy Lee (1877–1934), was outspoken about the importance of ethi-

  cal behaviour in the profession. What he never ceased to emphasize in particular

  was the need to be upfront about the funding source of any campaign, for reasons

  that will be explored below. Lee is well-known in PR circles in the United States.

  A University of Michigan study ranked him the most outstanding PR figure of the

  twentieth century.25 Called “Poison Ivy” by labour sympathizers for his deceptive

  use of press releases on behalf of John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado coal mine interests

  and other large corporations, he was a major force in developing the field of PR. He

  realized that companies could benefit greatly by taking PR advice into account early

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  in a planning process rather than after the fact, when some disastrous policy mistake had been made.

  Lee preached at times a rather austere PR morality, although the austerity was not

  always consistently maintained, except with respect to the feature mentioned above.

  However, some doubt if his practice was consistent with his teaching.26 The purpose

  of PR, as Lee saw it, was to create or encourage a favourable image of a company in

  the public mind. Defined in this way, there is no necessary connection with any lack

  of ethics. Supposing that a company has been unjustly accused, it may be wise for

  the company to hire PR consultants to undo the damage to the extent possible. The

  consultants can help by pointing out the risks from engaging in a lawsuit as distinct,

  say, from taking out paid
advertisements or using some other technique to neutral-

  ize the false story. On the other hand, it seems reasonable to suppose that, to the

  extent that damaging accusations are true, other things being equal, it will cost more

  to combat the message.27 The less truth is on one’s side, the more difficult it will be,

  generally speaking, to persuade a given public of the beliefs or attitudes one wishes to

  impart. The more difficult the task, the higher the fees one might expect to be levied

  for accomplishing the task.

  In such circumstances, there is an obvious temptation to master and use whatever

  techniques of persuasion will accomplish a given job, always allowing for the fact that

  unethical techniques, if discovered, will tend to discredit the firm making use of them,

  as we have seen. If a firm has been thus tainted, potential clients will be dissuaded from

  hiring it, as the decision to do so will reflect badly. That is the reason why a firm should

  try to ensure it does not get caught in unethical practices. In addition, PR practitio-

  ners generally are concerned that the profession not be brought into disrepute.

  What are some of the unethical practices that might tempt a PR firm? The

  Public Relations Society of America has made statistics available concerning cases

  brought before a Grievance Board or Panel between 1952 and 1985. Out of 165 cases,

  75 involved matters of fairness in dealing with clients; 50 were listed under the rubric

  “intentional communication of false or misleading information”; 46 raised questions

  about whether professional life was conducted “in accordance with the public inter-

  est”; 37 disputed whether there was “adherence to truth, accuracy, standards of good

  taste”; 32 pertained to “engaging in practices that corrupt the channels of communi-

  cation or processes of government”; 23 related to “intentional injury to professional

  reputation or practice of another member”; and 21 pertained to “using organizations

  purporting to serve one cause but actually serving an undisclosed special interest.”28

  Prominent in this list is one or another form of deception. One can infer, with

  reason, that if deception is attempted so often, it must get results and be profitable.

  Recall Aristotle and the importance of favourable ethos, what we might today call

  credibility. If US Widgets, Inc. is behind a whole series of articles favourable to

  its widgets, people who read the articles can discount in their minds what is said

  on the ground of probable bias. On the other hand, if the source for the articles is

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  misrepresented and accepted as a neutral evaluator, appropriate discounting will not take place. There is in this a deception, one that is favourable to the company.

  It is, therefore, highly valuable for a company to find some public icon—a movie

  star, revered clergyman, famous scientist, or the like—to endorse the product without

  any indication that they are paid to do so. In the 1920s, John D. Rockefeller Jr., on

  the advice of Ivy Lee, provided $26 million towards the church of Harry Fosdick,

  a modernist preacher who proclaimed a message of tolerance and conciliation

  between fundamentalists and modernists. Conciliation and co-operation, as distinct

  from antagonism and competition, were ideas that conveniently suited the cartel-

  orientation of Lee and the oil interests. Fosdick was on the board of the Rockefeller

  Foundation from 1916 to 1921. Lee, in the words of Marvin Olasky, “used all his

  PR skills to make Fosdick and his beliefs famous and influential.” Perhaps Lee and

  Rockefeller simply liked Fosdick, but the obvious connection between his preaching

  and the corporate interests of Rockefeller suggests otherwise.29

  A common method of diluting the immediate and obvious self-interest of a cor-

  poration in presenting a message is to form a separate group and fund it. Sometimes

  the title of the group is fairly revealing, at other times not. A “Sugar Institute” is fairly revealing of the interests represented. However, a “Smoker’s Freedom Society” conceals

  to a significant extent that it may be supported by tobacco money. When a logging firm

  sponsors what purports to be an environmentally oriented group, there is positive decep-

  tion if that funding source is not revealed.

  The lobbying power of the tobacco interests is enormous, precisely because of

  their reach in the sense of control ing voices not likely to be identified with them. As

  an example of this power, consider a story that appeared in a Canadian newspaper

  in 1993 about the weakening of the Ontario government’s resolve to curtail the sale

  of cigarettes by raising the legal age for tobacco sales to 19 and banning the sale of

  cigarettes in pharmacies and hospitals. A spokesperson for the cross-Canada chain,

  Shoppers Drug Mart, was quoted as saying that pharmacists would oppose the action

  and that a court challenge to the law would be a possibility: “It’s not worth the battle,

  because if there is a constitutional challenge they won’t win, and it’s not one of the

  government’s most important pieces of legislation.” What the story did not reveal was

  that Shoppers Drug Mart, which had 678 stores across Canada that year, was part of

  the Imasco group of companies. (There has since been a restructuring and Shoppers

  Drug Mart is no longer owned by tobacco interests.) Imasco, through its Imperial

  Tobacco cigarette brands, du Maurier, Matinée, and Player’s, at the time sold 66.2 per

  cent of manufactured cigarettes in Canada.30 In another case, the British newspaper

  The Independent reported in 1996 that the well-known, outspoken British psycholo-

  gist, Hans Eysenck, had received more than £800,000 in research moneys through

  a secret US tobacco fund and the major cigarette companies. The story noted that

  Eysenck “has consistently decried the scientific consensus that smoking causes lung

  cancer.” Eysenck said he had not profited personal y from the funds, but the point is

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  that people who heard his opinions should have been informed of the potential for conflict of interest so that they could make their own judgment about the credibility

  of the scientist.31

  In the light of the important part played by credibility in influencing public opin-

  ion, it is not surprising that Ivy Lee, when he gave speeches or wrote articles on the

  ethics of PR (which he often referred to by the name “publicity”), paid it close and

  repeated attention. He saw nothing wrong in sending press releases to newspapers,

  hoping to influence their editorial content, so long as the source of the releases was

  properly identified. Newspaper editors could make their own judgments about news

  value. To object to this practice, he said, was like objecting to a department store dis-

  playing many tempting goods. By contrast, he thought, “When public utilities buy

  newspapers and don’t let the public know that they bought them, they are obviously

  making a wrong use of propaganda.” If a newspaper is owned by a large business, its

  reports will favour those business interests. People have a right to know of such pos
-

  sible biases. Lee likewise condemned (rightly) the practice of some power companies

  of promoting in schools the benefits of private ownership of utilities as opposed to

  public ownership through governments. As he put it: “When power companies have

  school books written by professors in colleges and have these books put into schools

  without the knowledge of the people as to who is responsible for putting them there,

  that is a wrong use of propaganda.”32

  Lee recognized that “the truth” is often elusive, and that people’s perceptions

  of the truth are coloured one way or another. However, people are entitled to have

  basic facts to make sound judgments. In that light, they are entitled to know who

  is responsible for a certain expression of opinion or supposed fact. To this end, Lee

  even endorsed the “inflexible rule” instituted by James Gordon Bennett of the New

  York Herald of allowing no anonymous interviews.33 Such was the importance Lee

  attached to disclosure of a source’s identity that he once wrote, categorically: “The

  evil of all propaganda consists in failure to disclose its source.”34 Taken literally, this

  has to be false. There are other evils connected with propaganda. Even if the source

  is known, there can be harmful lies or other disreputable communication. However,

  this likelihood is reduced when people know the source and can hold it to account

  if the lie is discovered. When the source is known, the public can be appropriately

  on guard.

  In some of his high-minded writings, Lee showed considerable concern for the

  truth. The aim of PR, he wrote, is to get things done by “carrying out a truthful mes-

  sage to the public.” At times he followed this principle. His advice to the copper indus-

  try, when it was threatened by a story that alcoholic liquids distilled in copper pots

  were poisonous, was that it should find out the truth and withdraw copper from such

  use if the story were true. He also condemned the practice of putting artificial pres-

  sure on the press, through advertising, to publish one-sided articles or articles that the

  newspaper would “not print for its news value alone.”35

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