Ethicist

The much-parodied Ethicist column in the NYT magazine is one of the few earnest advice columns not pitched to yesteryear’s frazzled hausfrau. That’s probably why the New Yorker keeps making fun of it– that earnest advice is just so difficult for someone with a more malignant sense of irony.

This week’s column was about a PR agency and whether it’s ethical to allow someone to draft letters for you which you then sign. The Ethicist says it isn’t, and that those letters should be presented as from the PR person or from your company, rather than from you. I wrote in:

Dear Ethicist:
I’m sure you’ll get more than a few letters disagreeing with your recent PR ethics letter. Context is all, but in a business context, hiring a PR person to put words in your mouth is simple delegation of tasks. Hiring a PR firm is hiring someone to do your speaking and letter-writing so you can run your business. Once you’re larger than a one-person shop, you can’t write all your own ads or all your own letters.
The PR person’s job is to write as you and speak as you: to represent you to the public eye. If the CEOs of companies wrote or spoke every word attributed to them, no business would ever get done. When you get a letter from the president of the cable company tellingyou about the exciting new Cable TV offerings, and signed with a signature stamp, the PR and marketing folk have written that letter. When you read a newspaper article about a business transaction, and the executives speak glowingly of other firms, those executives have never spoken those words, and probably have never even seen them before. They have been written and approved by PR and marketing staff. Hiring a PR person to put words in your mouth is merely delegation of the communications tasks that must be performed as part of a business.

Randy the Ethicist replied and said I’m an unethical person. I’m impressed with the fact that he actually responds to messages, and almost honored to receive an insult from him:

Thanks for the interesting note which was, as you suggest, one of manytaking issue with that column. I’m afraid we continue to disagree. That a practice is common does not make it right. I’m sure we can both name many things that happen a lot that we wish did not. Hiring a PR firm to help with corporate communications is legit, takingcredit for someone else’s work is not, and signing your name to a letter or article you didn’t write is simply lying. As I wrote, if your readers understand that you’re merely endorsing the views you’ve put your name to, no problem; but if the ordinary reader is deceived, then you’re out of line.

Out of line indeed. If my PR person writes a letter announcing a new product, and I sign it, that’s not lying. If my PR person writes a letter claiming that my new moisturizer will enlarge my, er, coalition, that’s a lie, and both I and the PR agency I selected are culpable for that deception.