Ethics and client conflicts: Ken Kerrigan featured on the ‘Ethical Voices’ podcast

Infinite Global Vice President Ken Kerrigan was recently featured on the Ethical Voices podcast where he discusses some of the ethical issues that arise in the PR profession, particularly in the current stakeholder-driven landscape. 

In the latest episode of Ethical Voices, a podcast where PR professionals share stories and discuss real ethical issues that arise in the industry, Ken Kerrigan recently connected with Mark McClennan, APR, Fellow PRSA, for a discussion about a number of important ethics issues, including:

• Ethics and client conflicts
• Can corporations really be ethical media enterprises?
• The death of truth and the need for regulation

Providing insight on the key ethical dilemmas being faced today, Ken provided insights that “…the media’s gone away and that puts a lot more ethical pressure on the practitioner to make sure. Just because it’s easy to get your news out there in a clever video or blog post or LinkedIn post, it needs to pass the litmus test of being true and at a much higher standard. That’s not happening.”

When talking about how to help brands maintain an ethical focus in the current communications landscape, Ken comments, “We as practitioners and especially agency leaders, need to become more comfortable and practiced in saying the word no, firing a client, refusing to take a piece of business. I’m proud of the agency I currently work for. We won’t touch anything that has to do with guns. Period. Just in the last year, multiple clients have come to us who were either directly or sometimes tangentially connected to the gun industry. It could’ve been very lucrative for us, but we said, ‘No, we won’t do it. We won’t even entertain it.'”

Listen to the full podcast here.