PRSA's "Signatory" Status of Helsinki Declaration Remains Undocumented
Where is PRSA's Documentation of its Stated "Signatory" Status of The Helsinki Declaration -- an International PR Industry Ethics Accord?
September is #EthicsMonth in the public relations industry, and in the sad ecosystem of false claims, disinformation and bitter ironies in the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), we've now hit the zeitgeist.
It’s no secret that I’ve been a crosshairs-target of my former trade association’s ethics challenges for some years now, after I asked too many questions not to PRSA National's liking -- such as, where's the members' money?
But just when you think the bar could not fall lower for a U.S.-based trade association tasked with advancing ethical principles for the PR industry, Mother Earth splits agape, and down the bar plummets, into an even deeper chasm.
Three-and-a-half years ago, PRSA National Board minutes reflected that the organization’s leadership – then already mired in more than a year of documented ethics violations reported to the PRSA Board of Ethics & Professional Standards (BEPS) – voted in the affirmative to “sign off on” the International Communications Consultancy Organisation’s (ICCO) Helsinki Declaration of ethics principles, which is officially and validly supported by “41 associations across 70 countries covering 3,000 agencies,” according to ICCO.
Numerous current 2021 PRSA Executive Board members -- Michelle Olson (National Chair), Felicia Blow (Chair Elect), Joseph Abreu (Secretary), Michelle Egan (Treasurer; presumptive 2022 Chair-Elect) and Garland Stansell (Immediate Past Chair) -- were in the room that day in 2018... marked "present" for this Board meeting:
The above minutes appear to document that there was PRSA staff and Board confusion over the authorship and ownership of The Helsinki Declaration -- which was created by ICCO, not by the Global Alliance (GA)... the latter being a completely separate and rather curious organization, on which PRSA staff members have controlled the pursestrings by directly serving in the GA "Treasurer" role.
PRSA’s then-National Chair in January 2018, Tony D’Angelo, was tasked -- per above minutes -- at this Board meeting with getting BEPS’s blessing, in order to take the final step of official pen-to-paper in adding PRSA's organizational name to the list of signatories.
Whether D'Angelo ever actually consulted BEPS or not is now anyone’s guess.
But it appears something distracted D’Angelo from this task (or maybe BEPS refused to support the “sign-off” -- which would pose an equally concerning question).
In an effort to track down facts, I directly asked Mr. D'Angelo's attorney only several days ago (Sept. 18, 2021) for documentation of PRSA's "signatory" notification to ICCO. Thus far, he and his client have ignored my e-mail.
Either way, ICCO – as I have now verified multiple times from officials in Europe – has never received PRSA’s required documentation to pledge its compliance with The Helsinki Declaration's ethics principles… which, on its face, now places PRSA in violation (in my view) of Helsinki Principles No. 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8 and 9, given the otherwise false, public assertions to the contrary:
Despite missing paperwork, D’Angelo publicly lauded PRSA’s purported Helsinki Declaration “signatory” status nationwide to PRSA (and student PRSSA) members, on a national podcast in September of 2018.
The podcast aired one month prior to the October 2018 PRSA National Assembly -- and this timing is not insignificant.
In summer of 2018, D’Angelo had been fighting tooth-and-nail against PRSA bylaw ethics reforms, written and sponsored by my colleague, Susan Hart (then an APR, Fellow PRSA) and me (also then an APR, Fellow PRSA).
PRSA leadership desperately didn’t want a single ethics-reform bylaw to pass the required vote of the member Assembly, because had they passed, it would be a sharp rebuke of PRSA’s conduct -- akin to PRSA standing up in an "Alcoholics Anonymous"-like meeting to say, "Our name is PRSA, and we have an ethical-compliance problem."
The vast majority of members knew little or nothing about PRSA National leadership's 2017-18 ethics problems, at that time.
So it was relatively easy for PRSA leadership to bulldoze over voices of legitimate concern, with a propaganda campaign claiming -- among other things -- to be a "signatory" of a widely lauded ethics-advocacy effort by others in the global industry ... of which PRSA had absolutely no involvement in the first place.
Further, instead of actually fixing the systems in PRSA that had allowed for unethical conduct to occur – and holding accountable PRSA’s own leaders who perpetrated and/or enabled it – PRSA opted instead to trumpet to the world that they signed an ethics declaration that they appear to have never actually signed.
In PRSA’s now years-long litany of ethics foul-ups, could there be anything more on-brand than PRSA national leadership falsely claiming to their own members (including students) that they physically signed a third-party ethics code?
The gaslighting behavior is completely consistent with what Susan Hart and I experienced throughout 2018.
For example, D'Angelo told Susan and me repeatedly that he would be supporting at least one of our ethics reforms in 2018 ... to codify in bylaws that PRSA is a "nonpartisan" organization. D'Angelo even stated such for the record, on the "For Immediate Release" / FIR Podcast with Shel Holtz on July 30, 2018.
(Listen at Minute 25:20 of Shel's podcast):
But then what happened?
Within days, D'Angelo flip-flopped.
By the time the bylaw proposals were sent to PRSA Assembly delegates for review, D'Angelo all-out reneged on his support of our ethics-reform effort for PRSA to codify and comply with a nonpartisanship bylaw... later claiming that the word "partisan" couldn't be "defined" (despite a clear definition existing, which we provided), and that is was all too confusing and would therefore hamper PRSA's "advocacy" efforts.
(D'Angelo now serves in 2021 as Chair of PRSA Advocacy, which has a years-long history of only negatively criticizing one political party).
This #EthicsMonth in PRSA, I urge members to take a fresh look at what's happening to their organization, in disservice to ethical conduct.
While PRSA is no longer my organization, I'm still a very active part of an industry that PRSA claims to represent, so I'm therefore a stakeholder, regardless of PRSA's annoyances with my questions and documentation.