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Both practitioners and teachers of public relations often claim they practice or teach a "profession." Many scholars and advocates for public relations compare its practitioners to attorneys, physicians and clergymen. Also, many texts and teachers urge students to find evidence of professionalism in the public relations body of knowledge. One of the markers of professionalism often cited by those who want public relations to be perceived as a profession is the existence of a code of ethics or standard of appropriate behavior (Olasky, 1985 and Gabaldon, 1998).
In October of 2000 the PRSA Assembly approved a new PRSA Member Code of Ethics. This code replaced the older PRSA Code of Professional Conduct. According to the PRSA Board of Directors, the new Code of Ethics is intended to "...inspire ethical behavior and performance (PRSA Member Code, 2000, p. 1) but both the new code and the Code of Professional Conduct it replaced may neither reflect actual public relations practices nor establish standards appropriate for a profession. It seems the codes were created primarily to give the observers of the practice a positive image of public relations (Olasky, 1985). Wright also claimed that public relations codes of ethics are designed more to make practitioners feel and look good than to actually control or describe their professional conduct (1993, p. 16). This function of our codes of ethics seems to be the result of embarrassment by practitioners, scholars and teachers who fear public relations practitioners are perceived by many observers as unethical. The new PRSA Member Code of Ethics, ignores the obligation of every profession to hold values and recognize obligations that are unique to their particular profession. In other words, the PRSA Member Code of Ethics may be a code of personal or public ethics but it is certainly not a code of professional ethics.
The most popular and most frequently taught model of public relations practice is the four styles of approaches to public relations described by Grunig and Hunt in 1984. [See End Note 1] In 1989 Grunig argued that "only the two-way symmetrical model represents a break from the predominant world view that public relations is a way to manipulate publics for the benefit of the [client]" (p. 30). In 1992 Grunig and Grunig...