CorpComms Magazine

How important is the truth? I don't mean the 'truth' in a spiritual or existential sense, although that clearly is a matter of great importance. But the literal here and now truth.

To put it another way, how important is telling the truth? As a corporate communicator and the public-facing representative of your organisation, is it ever okay to tell lies?

Well most (although I suspect not all) of us would be quick to answer that question with a firm 'no'. But what about stretching the truth, or being economical with the truth? As Oscar Wilde once said The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Finding out the truth is a vital part of what the Parole Board is there to do. Many prisoners who come before the Board have a somewhat elastic view of the truth. Their primary concern as they make their case for release is not ethics but freedom.

Judgment calls

The job of the three-person panel that sits in judgment over the prisoner is to discern the truth behind the evidence presented to them. Then make a very difficult decision on the true level of risk that the prisoner would present back in the community.

Tellingly, the best thing that a prisoner can do in that situation is to tell the truth and hope that the Board will feel that he has changed enough to be released. If the panel comes to the conclusion that the prisoner is lying to them, then his chances of getting out will be greatly reduced.

The judgments that we, as professional communicators, have to take rarely involve such potentially life and death decisions. But they can have very wide, and sometimes catastrophic, repercussions for the organisations we represent.

The benefits of telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but are not always immediately apparent. If the journalist hasn't phrased their question in exactly the right words, should we give them that problematic if asked line to take? Do we really need to be so searchingly honest when finding the answer to that irritating set of FOI questions? Is there any moral obligation to put out that awkward statement of correction, just because the media have themselves misinterpreted those impenetrable statistics?

Lies have consequences

My answer to all these questions is a resounding 'yes' and there are a number of very good reasons why. Anne Gregory, professor of public relations at Leeds Metropolitan University, has explored the issue of why we should adopt an ethical approach to public relations.¹ She argues that a successful public relations strategy is based on building and maintaining good relationships with stakeholders, a vital part of which is trust. Trust is based on honesty and we all know that evasions, half-truths and lies will quickly lead to the breakdown of any relationship.

Your credibility as a professional communicator demands that you can be trusted, and honesty and integrity are integral to this. If I lie, or even mislead, a crime or home affairs reporter for the sake of mitigating one story that casts the Parole Board in a bad light then I immediately sacrifice a significant component of my relationship with that reporter. The next time we speak it will be on a very different basis to what went before, if they bother to call me at all.

Professor Gregory describes the concept of the PR adviser as the 'ethical guardian' of an organisation - the person who has to justify the actions of the organisation to the outside world and represent the views of the outside world within the organisation. This dual role entails being acutely sensitive to what the world thinks and at the same time acting as the conscience of the organisation.

Part of my job is to tell my chair and chief executive what the world really thinks of what they are up to. Over many years I have had to perform the same function for other senior officers, from ministers and chief executives to chief constables. They have rarely liked what I have had to tell them and they have not always followed my advice on what to do in response. But they have always been grateful to me for telling them the truth.

Someone's watching

If the ethics don't convince you, there are also more pragmatic reasons why you should follow the call for honesty and transparency. You will get found out! In the increasingly interconnected world in which we live we have already become familiar with the citizen journalists wielding their mobile phone cameras and Twitter streams. The police service in particular has had to come to terms with this phenomenon, with a number of incidents of police officers being caught out misbehaving by mobile phone cameras.

We are also now seeing the emergence of what you might call 'employee journalism'. Employees now regularly report from inside organisations on what is really going on behind the scenes. There have been several blogs by police officers reporting from the frontline, or the back office, in the fight against crime.² And now we have a blog by a serving prisoner.³ So far there seems to be little that either the police or prison service can do to stop these.

Add to these developments the increased time, space and energy that blogging activists can devote to researching and exposing lies or misleading claims, and you can quickly see that the level of scrutiny of public relations activity has never been higher.

Gregory talks about the power exercised by PR professionals and the obligation that comes with that power to act with integrity. Information is power and the corporate communicator controls access to information. With that power comes responsibility and the obligation

to act in an ethical manner and consider very carefully how information is used

or abused.

The zeitgeist of our times is to be open, honest and straight with the public. The truth is out there and neither can we, nor should we, try to silence it. 

1. Gregory (2006) - Ethics and professionalism in public relations - in Yeomans and Tench (ed) Exploring Public Relations - Prentice Hall
2. http://coppersblog.blogspot.com
3. http://prisonerben.blogspot.com

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