Ethics and PR

<jats:p>“Public relations” should be the uncomplicated concept of getting to know the people you deal with, serving them professionally and developing understanding and trust with each other. Our profession has lost a lot of its reputation over the last few years. This is partly because of the glossy and sometimes blatantly false hype that is seen up‐front in today’s “public relations”. Couple that with mechanical, impersonal “PR programmes”, in which only the name of the company on the word processor changes – and you have a jargonised, smooth‐talking recipe for redundancy. If the profession is to regain its credibility, company directors and practitioners must accept some basic facts about “communication” – and about our informed and sophisticated “publics”.</jats:p>