Dishonesty and deceit have become the defining features of much communication today, in politics and business alike. What are public relations professionals to do?

Samantha Villegas joins Abbie Fink and Adrian McIntyre to talk about PR ethics in a post-truth era. She talks about the importance of ethical standards, the impact of misinformation, and strategies for discerning truth.

And perhaps most importantly, Sam touches on the importance of courage in standing up against dishonest practices and the necessity of critical thinking to combat disinformation.

Read the transcript and notes for this episode on our website.

Key Takeaways

• The normalization of lying creates a challenging environment for PR professionals committed to honesty.
• Ethical communication is fundamental to the integrity of public relations and should prioritize the public good.
• PR professionals must develop a keen awareness of red flags indicating dishonest communication.
• Effective communication strategies must involve critical analysis and an unwavering commitment to ethical standards.
• Courage is essential when standing up for truth in professional settings, even when it means dissenting from the official narrative.

About the Guest

Samantha Villegas is an award-winning communications and outreach executive, with over 30 years of experience in public communication and participation. Sam is a member of Raftelis’ Strategic Communications Practice, helping utilities and local governments develop relationships and engage equitably with their stakeholders around critical topics like affordability, public health, and environmental protection. She counsels executives through programmatic changes, strategic planning, and reputational crises, and she designs and implements strategic communication and stakeholder engagement programs that bring diverse interest together in support of efforts that benefit communities' triple bottom line. Prior to Raftelis, Sam led communications programs at American Water, Loudoun Water, and for EPA’s Office of Water. Sam also owned her own communications agency for seven years, serving clients in the water sector, including AWWA, WRF, ASDWA and several utilities. Sam is actively involved in AWWA, WEF, NACWA, and PRSA (the Public Relations Society of America). She holds a master’s degree in environmental policy from Johns Hopkins University, she is accredited in public relations from PRSA and a member of its College of Fellows, and she holds certificates in public participation from the International Association of Public Participation.

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Credits

Copper State of Mind, hosted by Abbie Fink and Dr. Adrian McIntyre, is brought to you by HMA Public Relations, a full-service public relations firm in Phoenix, AZ.

The show is recorded and produced by the team at Speed of Story, a strategic communications consultancy for PR agencies and marketing firms, and distributed by PHX.fm, the leading independent B2B podcast network in Arizona.

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Dishonesty, deceit, misrepresentation, falsehood, prevarication, lies. We are living in a post truth era. Everywhere we look, someone has a version that is extra light on the truth. And as professional communicators, we have an ethical obligation to find the truth and communicate it truthfully and powerfully. But how do we do that when the world around us—and sometimes even our own clients or our own messages—are skating on thin ice when it comes to the truthiness or truthfulness of our communication? Abbie, what’s on your mind?

Well, one of my favorite things to do is to speak with up-and-coming public relations professionals and take the time to go and visit the journalism and public relations programs at the universities here. And I had that chance a couple weeks ago at Arizona State University, at the Walter Cronkite School. They have an in-house agency there with the students and they all have clients. And so we were having a conversation, and this comes up almost every time I talk to students, they say, “have you ever had to lie for a client?”

And I find when they would ask that question of me 10 years ago or so, absolutely not. There’s no way. I would never take on a client. I would never do that. Any opportunity to counsel or advise a client, there’s no way I lie. That’s my own ethical standards. And they started having this conversation, well, what if? Well, what if? Well, what if? And it really struck me that we have somehow normalized this idea that maybe lying or on the edge of a little bit of less truth may be becoming a little bit more normal. And so I had an opportunity to listen to a webinar that the Public Relations Society of America hosted. And I asked Sam to come on and join me to talk a little bit more about this concept of the normalization of dishonesty.

You know, lying was probably the worst thing I could do growing up. Whatever I had done that caused the lie was never going to be as bad as telling my parents that I didn’t do it. And one or two “wash my mouth out with soap” incidents taught me that lying was never going to be the best route. And so Sam, I’m excited to talk a little bit about this. As public relations practitioners and counselors to our internal teams and our clients, we’re regularly seeing what we know, just intuitively, are untruths being shared. And it’s becoming harder and harder for us as ethical practitioners to say, that’s not going to be the way we do it if I’m the one working with you. And so obviously, you’ve spent some time thinking about this and how the conversation has evolved. So what are you thinking, and how are you addressing this concept that we have somehow made dishonest communications a little bit more normal in our workplaces?

Yeah, it’s something that I think about a lot as a PR professional. I think the job has gotten so much more complicated. We used to just be able to build brands and build relationships. But now we’re in this world where we’re trying to discern what’s true and what’s manufactured, and there’s this burgeoning list of tools that are making those lines even more blurry. And we have frankly, an administration that plays fast and loose with the truth. And I’m not playing politics here. Just things that we can all verify with facts or with our eyes, things that we’ve seen. And it goes back to 2016, and that first big, bold lie, which was something about the crowds at the inauguration, right? And the president at that time had their spokesperson up there. I forgot the gentleman’s name.

Sean Spicer.

Spicer lied. And it was interesting because the Wall Street Journal was one of the only papers that wouldn’t call it a lie. Remember, back then, at the very beginning of Trump’s first administration, he started out lying, but at that point, it was so shocking to everybody, and particularly the media, that they weren’t ready to call it lies. They weren’t ready to call the president a liar, and they didn’t for a really long time.

I think it took, like, towards the end of his first term for some of the media to come on board with these are not truths, right? And to get more specific about it. In the meantime, just as we’ve become super desensitized to gun violence, which is one of those things that’s just kind of out there, and we move on, and it’s like a hundred thousand deaths a year, whatever it is, we’re desensitized.

We’re getting more and more desensitized to lies and the impacts that they’re having. And so back to your question, Abbie. As a PR professional, I’m constantly trying to find out, what can I do? What’s my role in this? What are the tools that are at my disposal. And how can I help, not my clients per se, but the general public. Because if you’re ethical, your loyalty is to the greater good. So what can I be doing? And that’s kind of where I started when I was pulling together the info for that webinar.

When I was in journalism school and studying we would toss out the word propaganda and things like that. And there was a very clear distinction between what that was doing and what we were doing in terms of communicating. And I wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to have talked about it in a larger context, but I understood the difference. One of my favorite things was when I would go with my grandmother to the grocery store or to the beauty shop and, you know, National Enquirer would be there, with headlines with all these sensational things.

And she would say, well, look at this story and look at this terrible thing and, “Grandma, that’s not true. There’s nothing truthful about it.” But you could look at that and sort of intuitively know this is just made-up stories. It’s harder and harder now to read something or hear something on the news, on the radio, in a blog post, on a social media post and say, is this true or not? My view is there’s a tiny little nugget of truth that’s buried in all of the other stuff.

And it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to sort through that as a consumer of the news, certainly, but as responsible communicators who are there to help push out messaging, where does the voice of reason come in? And where are our own ethical standards and moral standards aligned with the businesses that we work with and that we represent? And where do we settle with what? How much are we willing to participate in the bad behavior, if you will? And I think that’s becoming more and more difficult. It’s not necessarily the individual themselves . It’s just they’re struggling with, “I work for this organization. This is what I’m being asked to do. What harm could it be if I put out a thousand people rather than a hundred people? Is that really going to harm anybody?” If we start to slip in that regard, where do we stop? Where do we put the line in the sand and say, “I’m not going there anymore.” I think that’s becoming more and more difficult.

I also wonder, there’s this thing … I work in the water industry most of the time. Most of my clients are water utilities and I work in water PR, water communications. And over the years, detection technology has gotten so good that we see a lot more things in our source water that we then think, is this a danger to human health? And a discussion has to be had about what it is. And you know, EPA has to run studies for decades before EPA even sets a standard for the thing. PFAS is an example of that, right? New chemicals, emerging contaminants.

But the concern on the public side is we can see it, so therefore it is bad. And on the utility side, folks are saying, hey, we’re just able to see it now. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t there 10, 20 years ago. And it might be harmless. Right? And there’s a parallel, I think. I often wonder the fact that we’re—so, brands and persons, people are living so publicly now in so many spaces with every tool that’s been sprung upon us to enable those out-loud conversations, captured video, all the things. Are we more deceitful now or have we, has human nature, have we been this deceitful all this time, but we’re just now witnessing it more and more at higher volumes and we’re exposed to it more? I often think about that and wonder if that’s the case. Maybe it’s a little bit of both. Like, the more we see, the more desensitized we get. But I find that part of it kind of interesting. I’m curious about it.

Yeah, I’d weigh in on this really quickly as a social scientist. I think that’s a really interesting question. I haven’t studied it, but I do think that in social settings where the group organization is a bit simpler and certainly the numbers are smaller, there are stronger feedback mechanisms that would prevent this sort of thing. You know, just imagine a hypothetical village where folks know each other personally and if someone starts making up tall tales, everyone’s going to know and then they’re going to tell each other. Yeah, that guy’s been drinking too much or something’s gone wrong there. We now live in a world where we’re so saturated with communication and the little lies are everywhere. I was thinking as you were talking, Abbie, about the grocery store. You can walk down the aisle and you’re surrounded by lies on the packaging of things telling you something is “natural.” Well, that word is not regulated. And there’s literally nothing that it’s telling you about the truth of that thing. Or the implicit lie of a farm scene on the butter or the milk, with the sun coming up and a single cow. That is not where that product came from, right? That is not the truth of the origin of that product.

Have you seen the guy on Instagram that he’ll take a candy bar and he’ll—he’s a marketing guru, and he can take the ingredients and repackage it like it’s a healthy protein bar.

I haven’t, but that’s exactly right.

He’ll compare a candy bar to a protein bar side by side, and it’s like the same ingredients, but one’s magically an energy bar. Good for you.

Yep. And that’s the one I would probably buy.

So I don’t think it’s necessarily that we’ve always been doing this. I mean, it’s a valid question, and I don’t know the actual answer—which, by the way, is what a responsive communicator says when we don’t know. But my hunch is we have become more inured to this. We tolerate it in more places. And that’s really problematic then when nefarious actors of all kinds, domestically or internationally, who are intentionally manipulating the truth, knowing that, I’ll just speak for the United States, we’ve essentially become a nation of rubes who will believe almost anything if it’s communicated to us in a persuasive way by someone we think we identify with. It’s a real problematic situation.

And that may have existed forever as well. Right. Like that tendency. I think the other piece of this time that we’re in right now that I think is so hard to grapple with and navigate is the fact that it’s laid bare the volume of people in this country that really don’t have the capacity for critical thought. You know, it’s going back to the hair salon, Abbie, that you talked about where it was like grandma or mom read the Inquirer and thought it was a true story.

And it started with a nugget and then got blown into something. Now we’re seeing that on a grand scale with a very large portion of Americans that are tunneling through with their consumption of media to media that are not professional journalists, sources that are, that have an agenda in particular. And they’re not consuming anything to the counter.

You know, I have a friend who’s—it’s not a mixed race couple. What do you call it when the husband is one political party, wife is another.

A bipartisan couple.

A bipartisan couple.

A nightmare.

A nightmare. Yeah. And I’ve asked her some questions about her husband, and she was like, Sam, he doesn’t see. He’s never seen a video of an immigrant being snatched up on the street by a masked ICE agent. He doesn’t know that exists. He’s never seen that. And so you have to understand, like, it is two different realities that people are experiencing.

Well, and the ability for that type of content to be shared with others that believe the same way, right? I mean, look, if we go back, whatever, 10, 15 years ago, when social media was making its way into the business world, and as communicators, we thought what an amazing tool we have at our disposal. We can speak to many people. We have this opportunity. We didn’t have the words yet about owned media, but we knew it was our name on the page and we could push out this content. And then the science behind it with the algorithms and I can target specific things. And I mean, this always at that point was sort of valuable to us.

We’re trying to reach certain people, we want to put our messages. It was going to be a very direct approach. It had all of these things that were good for communicators. We finally had something that allowed us to speak to our very specific target demographic, if you will. Well, the bad actors know that as well, right? So now they have exactly the same tools to do exactly the same thing. And I think your point about critical thinking is really where the challenge lies, is that we how do we decipher when we, the consumer believes this document, this Facebook page, this Twitter feed is legit.

Like, they’re real. These are people I’ve seen before. They’ve built up their credibility, and they certainly wouldn’t intentionally lie. Therefore, this information must be truthful. And I guess where I go back to is, who’s pushing out that untruthful information? So if we can agree that there are more ethical journalists than not, that there are more ethical reporters than not, more ethical public relations practitioners than not, those of us that align with those ethical practices that make it a point of looking at both sides or all three sides or 10 sides of a particular issue and know that we are doing everything we can to put out information in whatever platform that is as right as it can be in the moment that we’re sharing it. I mean, a lot of things can change. Talk about the water studies and other things.

So for those of us that follow that more ethical line of thinking and make a commitment to it and then have to risk a lot in order to continue to do that. If I go back to the question that the students asked, have you ever been asked to do something, and my answer hasn’t changed over the years, that if I am ever asked to do something that doesn’t align with my ethical and moral standards, the answer is no.

My gut reaction, hopefully, is we would have never gotten to that point in the first place, because I’m pretty clear about how I approach. And this typically happens in more of a crisis situation because it’s my reputation that has to stand up alongside of whatever I’m talking about. And I may not always be on the right side of a particular topic, but I can still be truthful. And even if the truth is more hurtful and is not where we want to be, it’s still the truth.

And if I can’t do that, if I can’t stand up and be proud of what I’m saying, I shouldn’t be saying it. This is not the place for me to be working. This is not the organization that I should be representing. My gut feeling tells me that those that are putting out what we might deem as untruths probably feel the same way, that they aren’t doing anything untruthful. And so, to me, that’s where we have some challenges in what we’re doing. We both believe we are doing the right thing for the right reasons. And that’s very complicated.

But if we agree to the extent that the consumer of all of this information has some ability to decipher, there are some ways to identify or think strategically around what you’re seeing. And so it’s not all doom and gloom, there are ways of getting to the truth. And you shared some ideas in that in the webinar, and I’d like to get into those a little bit about what can we do as practitioners, certainly, but what can the consumers do, and what can they be keeping an eye on to decipher through what might be these untruths or this dishonest communication.

It begins with our awareness, right? It goes back to this idea that our role as PR professionals, strategic communicators, we have to think about what’s best for the public good, right? And centering the majority of people, what’s good for the majority, centering that in our behavior is square one. So when you were asked to do things as the PR pro, you’re thinking to yourself, does this benefit my company to the detriment of large swaths of people, or does this benefit my company and not harm anybody or also lift up others, right?

These are the mental questions we have to ask ourselves in order to understand whether it’s time to push back on something or cut ties and go. And so that’s the first thing that I center within myself as the PR pro is, and that’s happened in my career is, does this decision, does this action that this company wants to take, is it serving them only and to the detriment of others?

Because if it’s serving them only and it doesn’t hurt anybody, okay, that’s my role, I’m going to help them out, right? I’m going to do the bidding or whatever it is. But if it’s going to help them but deceive others, hurt others, keep others down, make life difficult for more people than it makes better, that’s the piece that you have to go, oh, this is, it’s time for me to inject. So I think of step one as like this awareness step, right? Where we are all kind of self reflecting. We’re thinking about our biases, our values that we bring to the table, and our professional boundaries. What are we going to do? And that’s what you were just talking about, Abbie, is you’re going through those steps in your head and extricating yourself if it doesn’t feel right, if it doesn’t feel aligned ethically and the PR pro has to kind of understand technically, what is that code of ethics, right?

What is that? What are we saying is wrong that the majority of reasonable people believe is not okay, right? That’s our gut. And then you talked about this too, which is that slippery slope where if you let a few things go by because they seem white lies or gray area, but you’re not going to, that’s not the hill you’re going to die on. You’re creating that environment that enables worse things to happen, right?

So starting with the small things that you think aren’t going to have the impact, but they’re harbingers of what the company might go towards. So really putting your foot down early and not letting that snowball effect happen. That awareness, I think, is still step one. And then we can go into the detection piece of it, which is the stuff that your red flags, the hairs on the back of your neck should go up on. And this is for PR people and for regular consumers that are out there consuming news or consuming information.

We should all be really suspicious of a company’s lack of transparency when they say things and don’t back it up. If someone says stuff and they say things like, I can’t cite a specific case for this, or I can’t cite data for this, or they’re citing dubious sources, bad data that sort of thing, that’s a clue. The pressure to spin situation beyond reason.

There’s framing, which we do. We frame what’s happening so our clients look good. If I have a water utility, for example, that has detected PFAS in their source water and they’re making all the investments to treat that PFAS so that the drinking water remains safe for their customers, the framing isn’t “they’ve got PFAs so they’re a bad utility.” The framing is, “This is happening. It’s happening all over the country, and this utility is taking all the proper steps to ensure public health.” That’s framing.

Spinning beyond reason is maybe suggesting to folks that PFAs aren’t there or that the, the company’s already handled it, or whatever the case may be. So being really skeptical of those absolutes and everything’s okay and we don’t fail and those types of things, that’s another red flag.

“PFAS are just part of the radical Marxist agenda.”

Yep. Yep.

That should be a red flag.

Yes, yes, exactly. The other piece of this is when there are dissenting voices, when they’re not heeded—H-E-E-D-E-D, not H-E-A-T-E-D. And this happens in corporate America a lot, right around the board table, around the leadership table, where there’s that one person that says, “I don’t think this is a good idea,” or “I don’t think we should do that because of this reason.”

And everybody says, “All right, Bob, sit down. We’re going to keep going.” Or if dissenting voices are saying, “you know what, that’s not actually true.” There’s some other data and people squash that, right? That’s another red flag. And then finally this idea that within an organization, if you’re seeing incredible turnover or on key roles, HR, legal, finance people are leaving.

So what does that look like in the US. How about the Yale professor that studies authoritarianism and has left their role and moved out of the United States? That’s a harbinger to me, but also all of these US Attorneys in the Department of Justice that—not the ones that were fired, but the ones that voluntarily left. So folks that left NIH, folks that left CDC, not the ones fired, but the ones that said, I can’t do this job anymore.

So I think that that’s all the red flags of detections. And then finally, the easiest one I think is discrepancies. You hear data said one way, but you have read other, you’ve read things to the counter. We have to pay attention to that, and we have to question that. You know, so massive discrepancies in what’s being revealed. These are the pieces of detection lacking support for claims exaggerating results.

And I’m sorry to keep picking, but the biggest, plainest example of this is our own administration and it’s part of the day-to-day playbook. And it’s scary.

It is scary, in my opinion, that it’s when we started the conversation, which is that it’s becoming normal and we can logically say there is no way that that’s true and just move on. And we’ve come to accept it as just a natural part of what’s happening. And that’s troublesome across every part of our world, right? Whether we’re talking about politics, whether we’re talking about health and safety, whatever that might be.

And you know, we all got taught about, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t true.” And I think we have to remind ourselves of some of that. And for me, as someone who makes my living in words and communication and sharing information, oftentimes really good, solid things that need to be out there in the world. There are things sometimes that I have to share that aren’t so great, but they are still, to your point, for the good of the community that we are in. Not everything we share is good news. But even the not-so-good news needs to be shared.

And having the strength of character, having the confidence, having that seat at the table, being the naysayer in the room, being the one that’s the dissenting opinion, and being strong enough in your convictions that you will not do what you know to be wrong. And make that be how you practice this profession that we have all chosen to go into and to the ability that we have to make that be the line that all our organizations are toeing as well.

That we will not participate in knowingly and actively putting out untruthful information. That the truth will always be the better option. And even when that truth is difficult to share, it will always be the right thing to do. And as consumers of this content, we owe it to ourselves to be it, as you say, in an awareness mindset. And if it seems like it can’t be true, it’s too good to be true, find other places for that information and come to a solid conclusion on your own, because you’ve done as much research as you can to find the answers. Because the truth should be out there and should be front and center in all that we do as communicators and all that we do as consumers of that content.

And I want to highlight how you talked about courage. Because I don’t think we all appreciate just how much courage in your belly it takes to speak up. And in the times in my career—and there have been several—where I saw stuff going awry and the room was silent, nobody was saying anything. It’s happened at the board table for nonprofit boards I’ve sat on. It’s happened in leadership meetings at companies. It just happened a couple weeks ago in my own company where something was revealed, and I waited a beat. Nothing was said. Nobody was saying anything. And it was a big company meeting. So I dropped a question in the chat because I was like, I’m gonna sneak in here. And somebody acknowledged it and it made my in. And I was like, “I don’t know about this. We should be thinking about this. I don’t think this is good.” And 140 people were on that call. I’m the only one, and that’s often the case.

And I’m not going to lie, the butterflies in my stomach anytime before you speak up, they’re real. So that courage is a real critical piece. And I’m often worried that too many of us don’t have it in us. We don’t have the courage to stand up and say the thing that needs to be said at the moment that it needs to be said.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Copper State of Mind. If you enjoyed the conversation, please share it with a colleague who might also find this podcast valuable. It’s easy to do, just click the Share button in the app you’re listening to now to pass it along. You can also follow Copper State of Mind in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app. We publish new episodes every other Friday.

Copper State of Mind is brought to you by HMA Public Relations Relations, the oldest continuously operating PR firm in Arizona. The show is recorded and produced by the team at Speed of Story, a B2B communications firm in Phoenix, and distributed by PHX.fm, the leading independent B2B podcast network in Arizona. For all of us here at Speed of Story and PHX.fm, I’m Adrian McIntyre. Thanks for listening and for sharing the show with others if you choose to do so. We hope you’ll join us again for another episode of Copper State of Mind.