Disinformation Challenges PR Professional Code to Fact-Check Their Own Work
Fact-checking verifies the accuracy of political statements and news reporting. Public relations professionals should apply the same discipline to their own and others’ handiwork.
Misleading references, misstatements and outright lies in speeches and news stories are called out by fact-checkers, which helps listeners and readers interpret what they hear and read.
PR content is subtler and less obvious. It’s usually not spoken and doesn’t have an author. But it can be pervasive and persuasive even when it is misleading or false. PR is rarely fact-checked by third parties.
In PR, the fact-checkers are PR professionals who demonstrate their professionalism by insisting on truthful assertions and references. That’s a lot of pressure to foist onto a profession that survives by making clients happy.
The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) has a code of ethics that include the principles of “advocacy, honesty, expertise, independence, loyalty and fairness.” The code rebukes brown envelope PR that is essentially bribing reporters or publications to cover a story. The code in practice may be fuzzier when it applies to influencers and podcasters.
PR and Fact-Checking
The PRSA code of ethics doesn’t include PR professionals acting in the role of fact-checkers on their own work or the work of their colleagues. You could say that is too much to ask of twenty-something PR staffers on their first jobs out of college. Or you could say that is how young, aspiring PR professionals should be trained to root out rot in their profession.
In an age littered with misinformation and disinformation, voters and consumers need all the help they can get to spot lies or half-truths from whatever source. PR professionals may not seem like the most likely defenders of the truth, but that makes their truth-telling efforts all the more powerful and believable.
This is where the ethics of the profession must overcome the enterprise of PR as necessary. It’s where telling the truth takes precedence over trimming the truth, even if it means confronting a high-roller client.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but truth still counts in our society. You can get away with half-truths for only so long before they catch up with you. A reputation for honesty and integrity can be a winning business strategy – both for clients and PR agencies.
Guidelines for Professional Conduct
Telling the truth can seem harder when there are examples of truth-trimmer successes. But the PRSA guidelines for professional conduct are clear:
- Be honest and accurate in all communications.
- Act promptly to correct erroneous communications for which the member is responsible.
- Investigate the truthfulness and accuracy of information released on behalf of those represented.
- Reveal the sponsors for causes and interests represented.
- Disclose financial interest (such as stock ownership) in a client’s organization.
- Avoid deceptive practices.
PRSA identifies improper conduct as:
- Front groups: A member implements grassroots campaigns or letter-writing campaigns to legislators on behalf of undisclosed interest groups.
- Lying by omission: A practitioner for a corporation knowingly fails to release financial information, giving a misleading impression of the corporation’s performance.
- A member discovers inaccurate information disseminated via a website or media kit and does not correct the information.
- A member deceives the public by employing people to pose as volunteers to speak at public hearings and participate in grassroots campaigns.
Disinformation and Propaganda
The PRSA guidelines don’t directly address the consanguinity of disinformation and propaganda campaigns, which are becoming more common in politics and business. Fact-checking also doesn’t tend to connect the dots between disinformation and propaganda.
Patterns of disinformation to justify a point of view or discredit a competitor exist on social and digital media but also can infiltrate traditional media.
In their book Media and Propaganda in an Age of Disinformation, Barbie Zelizer and Nelson Ribeiro describe how the “Slap a Teacher TikTok Challenge” was disinformation in a propaganda campaign paid for by Meta to discredit its social media rival.
TikTok had promoted controversial challenges with its young audience, so an outlandish challenge of slapping a teacher had an air of believability. The campaign took off in traditional and nontraditional media like a firestorm. But, as was later discovered and reported in The Washington Post, the slapping teacher challenge wasn’t launched by TikTok and never appeared on TikTok.
“It was the brainchild of a propaganda campaign developed by Targeted Victory, one of the most prominent communication consulting companies in the United States” and was paid for by Meta, according to Zelizer and Ribeiro.
The campaign’s goal, Zelizer and Ribeiro wrote, was to deflect criticism of Facebook for failing to remove fake news from its platform. Meta’s propaganda campaign ironically used disinformation to portray rival TikTok as dangerous for young viewers.
Image by Ameya Nagarajan
PR and Propaganda
Just a thread of plausibility is all it takes for disinformation to gain a foothold. Propagandists on a mission do the dirty work of spreading the disinformation. PR professionals need to be alert to disinformation used as fuel for a propaganda campaign and call it out by alerting credible fact-checkers and news media.
Promoting products, ideas and political candidates is useful and valuable to inform the public. But to avoid further erosion of public trust, professional PR practitioners need to help police the information highway and avoid the temptation to jimp into the disinformation sludge.
