Public relations and ethics

Public relations is defined as the management of communication between anorganization and its publics by the traditional approaches. Definitions of publicrelations differ from its functions and have different meanings in the historicalprocess. On the oher hand, critical approaches relate public relations functions with?the management of conscious of the publics? and define it as a consciousmanagement activity. Public relations have become the issue of many ethical debatessince its appear. These can be summarized as upper image oriented debates anddebates in practice. The opinions about which the public relations is the activity of theproducing spurious images, facts and deception is the basic ethics problem of thepublic relations. To provide ethical behaviour, public relations organizations havecreated cods of ethics. But most of the practitioners pay no attention to this codes.There is too many approaches to the public relations ethics; the most known is socialresponsibility approach. But firms are also using this approach for its long-termprofitability. They attempt to build positive images by social responsibility activities.Thus, many of the authors who has the critical approach, see social responsibility as ameans of manipulation and as a invention of public relations.