Need for ethics in media and business decision-making

The need for ethics in media and business decision making

When I read this question, multiple situations pop into my mind: Enron, Watergate, Jayson Blair, all those tobacco companies, even William Hearst and his yellow journalism. To me, that was reason enough to need ethics in media and business decision-making. All things considered, I believed the situations explained themselves.

They don’t.

We need to explain why we need ethics because of these situations. A recent article in the PR Daily said that PR students think they are supposed to lie. Logic suggests that if we let them keep thinking this way, there will be more cases for ethic classes to study.

So, here are many reasons it is beneficial to have ethics in a media and business environment.

First off, ethics is required for social interaction. In every situation there is a certain level of trust that must be met. When you order at a restaurant, you trust that the employee will bring you what you ordered and you trust that the cook will make it correctly. In the business world, companies do the same. They trust their employees to do their jobs honestly because if they didn’t, goals wouldn’t be accomplished. They trust other companies to meet agreements made and they meet their agreements.

Without ethics, companies couldn’t survive. If everything came down to lying, cheating and stealing, no one would trust each other and nothing could be done. There is too much interdependency in our business world – everyone needs something from someone. Since ethics is acting out on moral values and lying, cheating and stealing are against the cultural norm, the companies partaking in unethical decision-making would basically be asking to go bankrupt (I will get into that later).

The second reason is to resolve conflicts. If company A put out ads claiming company B had products that caused death and there was nothing that said false advertisement wasn’t allowed, then company A just screwed over company B. This, of course, is unfair and definitely unethical. However, we only know it is unethical because we know what is ethical. Ethics help make business environments easier to work in and make them fairer. Having an ethical code in businesses and in the media helps employees in those fields have guidelines to make decisions.

William Hearst believed it was okay to tell a little lie in his papers because it meant more business. What if that happened today and journalists had the ability to tell little lies like President Obama just committed adultery. Our culture, which doesn’t approve of adulterers, (see, ethics in work) would be outraged. 

Without having ethics, the journalists making the decision to write that story would be under no obligations to write the truth. The conflict couldn’t be resolved because, well, there wouldn’t be a conflict.

Thirdly, we need ethics because our culture needs some sort of moral hierarchy. Since businesses need the publics to be a business, whether they agreed with ethics or not, they would have to follow an ethical code in order for their product to be sold. Society places a high value on trust (as mentioned earlier). Without really knowing it, most people trust people to do even the smallest of tasks. If the public saw that a company did not follow a code of ethics, they would not trust the company.

The need for ethics in media and business decision-making is of great importance. Without ethics, the world of business and media would not be functional. Having ethics in decision-making, future PR friends, should be the butter on the bread, the parachute to the skydiver, the… well… you get the point.