A Comparison of Public Relations Ethics in Spain and the United States

This paper aims to assess potential similarities and differences in the way that public relations professionals approach ethics in Spain and The United States. The approach taken for this study was first a thematic analysis of industry-accepted codes of ethics. These were the PRSA Code of Ethics from the United States and the ADECEC and Dircom codes of ethics from Spain. Although the codes provide a basis for a basic analysis, it is hard to say how public relations professionals implement ethical practices in their work solely based on codes of ethics. To further study the ethics in practice, interviews with public relations professionals from a 2012 trip to Madrid were transcribed and analyzed for key themes. To assess ethics in practice in the United States, public relations blog posts related to ethics were analyzed for key themes. The history of public relations in Spain is much shorter than in the United States The histories of the and cultural differences may be the cause of some of the differences in ethics.