The Pentagon Blogs

1. In her fifth blog, The Cyberbullying Dilemma, on February 3, 2012, Anne Johnston said, “Ethically, Pokin followed standards and codes of conduct drafted for his profession.” If I pull this statement out of context it would appear that Anne was giving Pokin a pass because he ‘followed the book’ which in my mind is akin to the Nuremberg defense: I was doing what I was told, I was following orders. Of course the ‘orders’ that Pokin followed were the ethical guidelines of his profession, right?

Johnston is correct in pointing out that Pokin was not simply following the ethical guidelines, he was interpreting them. This brought to mind an interesting thought. Guidelines are not answer lines. They are not resources that one can flip open, run the finger down the page to a particular issue and, voila!, there’s the answer. Rather guidelines are there to do what they suggest - guide. It is up to the journalist to interpret the guidelines to meet the particular situation.

This often provokes a dilemma as Anne points out, “Pokin was in a lose-lose position.  He was going to be “damned” either way.” She is stating a painfully obvious situation for any person who daring enough to put him or herself out on a limb to write about any topic that is fraught with ethical overtones. You cannot please everybody because there is not one correct answer to any controversy. This doesn’t mean you necessarily have to be alone to ‘face the wolves’ as Anne noted he has “his editor’s support.” May we all be so fortunate.

2. What’s so bad about PR firms representing bad people? Their money spends just like everyone else’s so why all the fuss? Cecilia Lopez–Abitang, takes the focus of the issue from the abstract (it’s only money) to real world experience (it’s the people under the control of the despot being represented). In her fourth blog, P.R.’s Identity Crisis, posted on January 28, 2012 she says, “Born in the Philippines, I was a martial law baby during then-President Ferdinand Marcos' second term...Martial law was already in effect starting 1972 until 1981. During that period, he gagged the press - media people were jailed, tortured and killed, while media establishments were closed down, among others. Given this context, did the P.R. people even consider the ethical issue of working with his government?”

Cecilia brought to my mind how easy it is for PR firms to be seduced by money and power. Of course there is still the unethical behavior of the despot that has to be dealt with on an emotional level. Does money assuage that stain on the soul? Not really but it is salved by the human ability to depersonalize the victim through stereotype and generalization. As long as I don’t actually see the results of my work, i.e. supporting a murderer, then only encountering abstract statistical information I can blithely go on my way. After all it wasn’t humans that were harmed or damaged or killed it was numbers on a spreadsheet.

The definition that Lopez-Abitang offers for PR goes a long ways towards keeping PR firms from shaking hands with the devil. She posits, “Public relations is an organization's concerted and targeted effort in keeping the communication lines open within the organization and with its various stakeholders to inform and generate public discussion, while upholding the highest ethical standards, that will result in relationship-building and shared understanding.”

As long as PR firms work in ivory towers of numbers and statistics they will be prey to unethical ventures. However, if PR firms are focused on ‘relationship-building and shared understanding’ then engaging both the client and the stakeholders they can  represent their interests through wise ethical decisions.

3. On January 14, 2012, in her second blog post, Crystal Maruszak set me to wondering about an ethical dialectical dilemma. She uses Bok’s three questions to explore the case of James Fray’s passing off a fictional story as an autobiography and how he was exposed by Smoking Gun. In her response to the first question (How do you feel about the actions?) she says, “It’s not just for an author to claim fictional work to be biographical, convicting readers that your life turned out one way because of your actions could leave them to take from your experience certain outcomes that wouldn’t be true. But it’s also not fair to blindside someone (in this case Smoking Gun releasing info on James Fray without giving him a chance to refute it).”

That raised this dilemma for me which had never occurred to me before: Is it the responsibility of the journalist to check the story with the perpetrator? So I call up James Fray and ask, “Did you falsify information in your biography?” What do I expect he is going to do, tell the truth when I am accusing him of being dishonest? What is my ethical responsibility? Then again it is the journalist’s responsibility to check the sources of the story and James Fray would be the ultimate source.

Maruszak answered Bok’s second question (Is there another professionally acceptable way to achieve the same goal that will not raise an ethical issue?) this way, “Yes, Smoking Gun could have given notice to Fray and his publishers before releases this secret news to the world. I ran this example by a few co-workers in the communication field at my company, and the consensus was that sites like the Smoking Gun are valuable, but very "low brow" because of the manor in which they share news.”

I’m not sure I would arrive at the same resolution as Crystal. Smoking Gun had information that they felt was correct. They had caught someone in an unethical act and they exposed that behavior. Again, should perpetrators be given the benefit of the doubt? Also, what good would have resulted from contacting Fray and his publisher beforehand? This blog raised quite a few questions for me.

4. What is the right answer? What is correct? In his first blog posting on January 10, 2012 James Kearns answers these questions from a postmodern perspective. He writes, “Just because something is bad in my view, does not mean it is universally bad…What this boils down to is there are two sides to everything, and virtually every negative has a counter.” So where does this leave the ethicist? If there is no metanarrative to guide us then who has the authority or what is the authority upon which answers to ethical dilemmas can be based?

Kearns recognizes this issue and puts forth his own methodology for arriving at an ethical solution to perplexing problems. He states, “When making an ethical decision, I look at the dilemma from several perspectives.  First, foremost, and most cliché, does anyone get hurt?” While it may be a cliché it is a basic ethical barometer that has been around for centuries all the way back to Hippocrates. 

However, I question whether this is the first and foremost. After all, does this mean that Kearns still believes that cigarettes should be available as he notes, “Even cigarettes have supporters who say, in spite of the health risks, if they want to smoke, let them smoke, people know the risks and can make their own choice.” From this perspective it would appear that Kearns is advocating freedom of choice as the prima materia of ethics since it is common knowledge that cigarettes cause harm.

Then again Kearns acknowledges that, “From what I have learned so far about ethics, the subject seems to be very, “what do you think” with a very weak structure.” Perhaps the weak structure he recognizes doesn’t so much flow out of ethics but is the postmodern milieu in which we now reside.

 5. What guide shall I invest with ultimate authority when it comes to making an ethical decision? The answer to that question is rather apparent for Justine Luzzi. In her second blog post on January 14, 2012 she says, “Knowing information that is a secret, and whether or not to disclose that information is a very hard to decision to make…ultimately I would follow my gut…All you have to do is listen. If you listen to your conscience you’ll never do the wrong thing.”

I admire the optimism Luzzi expresses especially in a day and age when intuition is, for the most part, programmed out of human beings through religion and education. So it is refreshing to hear someone express faith in the role of conscience in making decisions. However, in my experience getting to the conscience usually takes a concerted effort to resolve dysfunctional family patterns as well as psychological and emotional issues (like denial, shame, overweening expectation, reliance upon validation, etc...). These are things that can have undue impact upon my decision making and if I am unaware of that influence then, especially if I’m in a position of authority or have control over the flow of information, I can do great harm.

Luzzi recognizes the power of holding information. She states, “Knowledge is power, the more we know the better we’re informed. In any profession in the world, people are going to be face with ethical dilemmas. It’s just about doing the right thing, and listening to that gut feeling. Like we spoke about in our groups in class, if you can sleep at night, you did the right thing.” Yet I don’t believe she recognizes the hardship that making even a good decision can bring.

Did Ellsberg sleep like a baby after he released The Pentagon Papers? Did Bradley Manning sleep good after he released the cables to Julian Assange? My guess is they did not even though they came to what I believe is a good ethical decision. 


Even when guided by my conscience, there will still be consequences and people, more than likely, will be hurt or adversely affected by my decision. Can I sleep well with that knowledge? If I can then…