A Word from Mr. Bernays

Edward L. Bernays, who gave Public Relations its name, puts character and integrity as the chief qualities of what he calls the ideal public relations man. Although he conceded that such a creature does not exist in the flesh, he distilled from more than 70 years of PR experience a set of standards that the ideal PR man would have to live up to.

It is a tough course that Mr. Bernays laid out for the practitioner who would aspire to the ideal. First of all, "he should be a man of character and integrity, who has acquired a sense of logic without having lost the ability to think creatively and imaginatively.”

To Bernays, who counselled his way through decades that covered dismal periods of muckraking, charlatanism and irresponsibility in American business, integrity is so central that he says in effect that there can be no PR without integrity.

Bernays, acknowledged as the “father of professional PR counselling,” believed that PR practice is based largely on that crucial quality of character and integrity. Codes of ethics, for instance, may try to tell the PR man how he should conduct himself in the general practice of PR, but the final test, the litmus test, he himself will have to take.

“The professional must be his own arbiter,” Mr. Bernays wrote decades ago. “If he lacks character and integrity, he will fail to maintain the professional conduct on which he will be judged and on which the profession as a whole is judged.”

The beautiful part of the canon of Mr. Bernays is that what he says is true, even in real life. In PR one can endure if he has character. One may survive from year to year , and even get rich and famous, without   integrity, but he will miss the fun--of knowing that doing it right, really does work.

Character in PR could refer to any number of imperatives, but one safe test would be measuring oneself against our old-fashioned concepts of right and wrong. And when one still has to learn right and wrong when he enters PR work, that could be a problem indeed.