[Author]
1.0 Specific loyalties and ideals
1.1 Journalism
Journalism has two ideals in the exercise of the profession, namely: the respect of truth and upholding the public’s right for information (Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance [MEAA], 2014). These fundamental principles serve as foundational precepts that guide journalist in obtaining all information necessary from sources and in reporting the same to the public. The truth is the bedrock on which honest, fair, and independent reporting finds meaning and protection. In brief, its loyalties rest upon the truth and the public. The journalists’ loyalty with their employers has been presumed to always exist within professional ethical boundaries. The limited but focused loyalties in this profession make implementation of standards much easier and less prone to situations of contrasting loyalties. Loyalty to the truth and the public provides consistent values rarely contradictory in practice.
The Journalists’ Code is a 50-50 combination of positive and negative ethical standards. The positive standards cover the reporting, interpretation, and disclosure of essential facts; the proper attribution to the sources; the retrieval of information; the presentation of pictures and sounds; the attitude towards grieving and individual privacy, and; the utmost effort against errors. The negative standards cover handling of discriminative characteristics of people; the potential conflicts between personal interests and independence; the acceptable effect of advertising in the journalistic contents; the issue of plagiarism; and, where inevitable, the disclosure of any payment received in the process of performing journalistic duties. It pushes for accountability as a means to engender trust for the professional and the profession from the public and the stakeholders involved in each report or opinion written and published. The surprising insistence of the Code be freed from the influence of advertisers, its primary sources of revenue, provides an ideal freedom to maintain professional independence even if practice may vary from company to company.
1.2 Public relations
The public relations profession has multiple declared loyalties: the clients, the employer, the community the media, and the profession (Public Relations Institute of Australia [PRIA], 2014). Its primary ideal rests upon professional competence. This professional competence rests on dealing with clients fairly and honestly, avoiding conflicting interests, disinterested objectivity, and confidences. Its loyalty revolves around parties and the ethics of the deal. The specific loyalties and ideals of professional financial advisers (Association of Financial Advisers [AFA], 2014) are comparative with that of the public relations professional. The multiple loyalties in this profession present potentially strong temptations against ethical behavior, especially when the ethical standards of one loyalty (e.g. the public) contradicts that of another (e.g. clients). For a pharmaceutical company that wants to sell a new drug that had been reported to contain potentially dangerous substances, for instance, the success of a public relations program possesses an inherent threat to the consuming public. In this conflict of interests, should the public relations professional relations forgo a large professional fee to protect the public?
The Individual Code is a mix of positive (87 percent) and negative (13 percent) ethical guidelines. The positive guidelines cover all aspects in the professional standards except for the two negative guidelines that deal with conflict of interest and injury of the professional reputation of fellow public relations professional.
1.3 Advertising
Advertising agencies have multiple declared loyalties to a similar group of stakeholders as the public relations profession, such as the clients, the community, the media, and the agencies themselves (American Association of Advertising Agencies [AAAA], 2014). Their ideals, cited in its Creative Code, revolve around the content of their advertising message, much like that of journalists with their reports and opinions. Its ideals rest on truthfulness, substantiated claim, and tastefulness. However, due to the unique service and function it provide, advertising possesses an entirely unique perspective on its ideals. As such, advertising suffers vulnerability to conflicts in loyalties, particularly when the products to be promoted had inherent threats to the public, such as tobacco and alcoholic beverages. Since its success depends largely at creating strong positive impressions of the products promoted, that success engenders unethical effect against the consuming public at which the profession declares loyalty, supposedly in the same degree as that with the clients.
The Creative Code is a purely negative set of guidelines. Truthfulness, and the closely related ideal of substantiated claim, is expressed in negative terms, such as lack of false or misleading statements or of exaggerations, of testimonials not reflecting actual opinion, of insufficiently supported claims, or of distorted truth in the use of meaning or practicable application of statements (from scientific authorities). Tastefulness is also expressed negatively, that of lacking unpleasant statements that offends public decency or of the minority. The advertising code, thus, consists of a negative code that aims to regulate unethical practices instead of proposing ethical activities.
2.0 Functions and Responsibilities
2.1 Journalism
The primary functions of journalism are conveyance of information, ideas and opinion (MEAA, 2014). These functions derived from many sub-functions, including the search by questioning and surveillance, recording information as received, and disclosure with specific attention to a fidelity to the truth. These functions must be guided by four journalistic values: honesty in getting the information and disclosing it to the public; fairness to all parties that are subjects to the information and to the report; independence (without undue bias or prejudice in whatever means or reasons) in disclosing the truth to the public, and; respect for the rights of others, of the parties mentioned in the information and the report (e.g. right of privacy; private grief).
2.2 Public relations
The primary functions of public relations professionals is to provide public relations service to its firm’s clients, or specifically on the clients assigned to the professional, in the furtherance of the clients’ business objectives (PRIA, 2014). Their responsibilities though rest upon ensuring that the interests of the clients are protected within the confines of professional confidences. The transaction revolves around specific public relations services on a fee per service basis. These functions and responsibilities are comparable with that of the professional financial advisers (AFA, 2014), which in a large part consultative in nature.
2.3 Advertising
The primary functions of advertising agencies are the creation of a multimedia-based message to support the marketing objectives of their clients (American Association of Advertising Agencies [AAAA], 2014). To perform that, they use words, testimonials, and claims of facts that are expected to effectively send the message across and stay in the mind of the consumers long enough to translate it into sales of the clients’ products or services. Their responsibilities consist on a specific constructive role in its clients’ business, and such responsibilities viewed in the eyes of a legal, and perhaps, ethical perspective.
3.0 Inter-code differences
3.1 The profession
The essential difference between the journalism, public relations and advertising professions rests in their unique relationships to their clients, thereby defining the discharge of their services. Both public relations and advertisings focused on individualized services. The public relations profession caters to companies who need to send a relations-type marketing message to its market; while advertising caters also to companies or individuals who need a media-type message for use in their marketing programs. In fact, areas in the public relations services may need the services of advertising to achieve its objectives. In contrast, journalism serve directly only the reading public, which may not include those people involved in the reports or opinions published. Advertisers too represent indirect clients of journalist. In fact, they are more clients of the publishing company who hired journalists. The exercise of the journalist profession is less susceptible to pressures coming from its direct clients than the other two professions; although, an indirect demand for penetration rates, useful for advertising clients, may threaten professional independence under a financially unstable employer.
3.2 The public
Regardless of what can be found in their respective code of ethics, both public relations and advertising professions had more accountability to their direct clients than to the public. Because their source of income comes directly from clients, much of the definition of their activities and their relationship or impact to the public are defined not by the standards of the profession but that of the clients hiring them to provide service. In fact, it is inherent in both professions to seek clients for their services, and not wait for clients to seek for their services. These professionals receive a share of the billing charge to the client for the time or complete project rendered. In contrast, the journalism profession had no direct contact from clients who paid for professional pay. Journalists receive their pay not based on billable hours from the clients. Instead, it is based on the number of articles written for the public who do not directly pay the journalist. This provides the profession a much better environment to stay independent in their craft and the messages they sent to the public. Even the reading clients do not demand specific benefits for themselves, other than the truth, fairness of reporting, and independence of mind. In other words, journalists serve the public more directly than public relations or advertising professionals.
In addition, largest differences between the three professions may be found in the manner and quality they discharge their respective services to the public whether directly or indirectly. Because of its direct connection to the public, evidenced by their own name appearing with their published articles, journalists inherently have direct and enormous accountability to the public for the work outputs they generate. With their byline appearing in print or broadcast, the public can demand from them direct accountability for breaching ethical standards in their works. In short, journalism is a more public profession than either public relations or advertising.
Conversely, both the public relations and advertising had no public face. Their outputs do not bear their name, removing the chances that the public will demand their accountability for their works. In their behalf, the clients take on all the negative and positive impacts of their respective outputs as released to the public. In the eyes of the public, they (through their works) belong to the clients’ corporate identity. Advertising is essentially a back-office function. Public relations, however, inherently possess a public side in their services (e.g. public events activities). Nonetheless, their public face is identified to be that of the client.
3.3 The client
The direct clients of the journalists are the employers, the companies who pay for their journalistic works; not even the reading public who reads their published works. In contrast, both the public relations and advertising professionals had similar types of clients, whether corporate (marketing units) or individuals (e.g. politicians, professionals). For the advertising professional, however, their more direct clients are their employers for which they represent as service providers on a project, not per billable time, basis. The public relations professional, which often work on a consulting capacity, tend to use billable hours for services rendered; although optionally on a per project basis. In their case, they actually receive income from clients through the employer based on personal services rendered. However, the difference between public relations and advertising in this respect is too thin to significantly differ as both employers may act as conduits in collecting their commission fee from the clients.
3.4 The employer
The nature of the services rendered in journalism, public relations, and advertising created some shades of differences in their relationship with employers. All three professions possess employer-less potentials: journalism as direct contractor of full services; while both public relations and advertising as consultants with options to subcontract portions of their output products or services. As regular employees, all have allegiance to their employers, differing only on the marketing side of their skills, knowledge, and services. Journalists do not have to market their services to direct clients. In contrast, both public relations and advertising professionals inherently had to market themselves to direct clients to generate revenues for their employers. Although the employers’ marketing team may exist to do this aspect of the job, in their absence, these professionals are constrained to market their skills to direct clients.
3.5 The coworker
In relation to coworkers, the three professions have inherent responsibility to protect the integrity of their coworkers’ profession through their personal ethical behavior in discharging their services. Unlike journalists who are essentially independent workers, public relations and advertising professionals need a team from various fields of expertise (e.g. design, copywriting, public event organizing) in order to discharge successfully their respective jobs. Public relations, for instance, would need different teams to handle the print media, the broadcast media, and the events aspect of the contracted service. An advertising professional may need a team comprising various skills and expertise to create the proper advertisements either for print media channels or broadcast channels or both. Although broadcast journalists, such as episodic reporters, may need other journalists to cover specific report assignments, the essential journalistic work continues to be largely individualized, and independent of a team.
3.6 The service
With their byline appearing in the published work, the journalists have full accountability for their published writings. Although they share legal accountability with their editors, they engage the public directly both in their personal capacity as professionals and in their corporate capacity as the employers’ representatives before the public. They are accountable both to the public and their employers for their unethical behaviors.
Such dual accountability does not exist for both the public relations and the advertising professions. The public cannot hold them professionally or personally accountable for repulsive outputs. Only their direct clients can demand from them such accountability, and not only from them, but also from their employers. Inherent with the risks that the direct clients take on, they tend to demand a specific service output based on their specific requirements. One advantage for the public relations and the advertising professional in this scenario comes from the strong involvement of the direct client in ensuring specific outputs. Being so, direct accountability from such output becomes attributable to the direct client, not to either professional. One disadvantage, though, is the vulnerability of the service to unethical prescriptions from the direct clients. If a direct client demands that certain feature of the output included even if these features turn out to be ethical violations of the professional code, the professional cannot insist otherwise because the client takes on the public risk anyway.
3.7 The output message
In the light of their respective professional ethics, important differences between the three professions exist. The journalists have full professional and legal accountability for unethical violations made in the preparation of their output message due to the identifiable presence of their byline in their outputs. Depending on the legal standing of MEAA, for instance, in the professional license of the journalist, the Journalists’ Code of Ethics must be followed faithfully to prevent professional repercussion to the journalists. If the association can request for banning of journalists from practicing the profession, committing the grave office of privacy invasion of a source may lose the journalists their privilege to practice journalism for life. In addition to that, a legal suit may threaten the journalists’ civil liberty if proven guilty. For both the public relations and advertising professions, the association may impose sanctions on misleading claims, for instance. However, that may not necessitate a suit in court. This scenario is particularly true with the advertising profession. The public relations profession, however, is still vulnerable to professional and legal sanctions. In a case of conflict of interest (e.g., a public relations professional serves simultaneously two competing companies), the PRIA may declare a professional sanction. In addition, the direct client may also file a case in court for breaching fiduciary responsibility to the client.
References
American Association of Advertising Agencies. (1990, September 18). Standards of practice
of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Ams.aaaa.org. Retrieved from: http://www.ams.aaaa.org/eweb/upload/inside/standards.pdf
Association of Financial Advisers. (2014). Code of ethics. Afa.asn.au. Retrieved from:
http://www.afa.asn.au.standardseducation/code-of-ethics.
Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance. (2014). Journalists’ code of ethics. Alliance.com.
Retrieved (on 27 October 2014) from: http://www.alliance.org.au/code-of-ethics.html
Public Relations Institute of Australia. (2014). Individual code of ethics. Pria.com. Retrieved
(on 27 October 2014) from: http://www.pria.com.au/eventsawards/members-code-of-ethics.html
