An Evaluation of Kenya’s Public Relations Practitioners’ Understanding of their Career’s Ethical Issues

Ethical issues have been raised about the practice of some careers whose professional output in society has been in doubt due to perceived dishonesty, insincerity and lack of genuineness, considering that truthfulness is a critical virtue that endears patrons to a given business. One such career that has been viewed with so much skepticism is Public Relations, whose ethics code has never been universal despite the adoption of the International Code of Ethics for Public Relations, popularly known as the Code of Athens in 1965. The same is true about the practice even within individual countries, where professional values differ from one practitioner to the other. In Kenya for instance, the professional body is yet to regularize the trade through legislation. This has resulted into professional abuse by some, brought discontent and enhanced misconception with many thinking it a ‘walk-in-walk out’ career with or without any form of training. This study therefore was carried out to ascertain the practitioners’ understanding of the professions’ ethical issues, and how they navigate through as they discharge their daily duties. To achieve this, a stratified random sampling method of 110 practitioners drawn from Kenya’s Public Relations Society (PRSK) was used. It was found that most practitioners were shrouded with a cloud of uncertainty about ethical issues, forcing them to practice PR based on their own instincts depending on what they considered right or wrong as there was no law that held them to account (responsible) should they err.