ABSTRACTThis article critically analyzes the ethics of Coca-Cola’s public relations strategies through the lens of corporate social responsibility, issue management, and moral legitimacy. Corporate legitimacy is essential for corporate survival and, in today’s complex environment, expectations for legitimacy have shifted. Corporations are called on to consider their roles in the context of the greater good. These changes call for an examination of what constitutes ethical communication for public relations practitioners. While theoretical advancements in the area of ethics sketch the landscape (...) for providing for greater transparency in what the aims of organizations should be in providing for ethical communication, more needs to be done to examine the specific content of this communication. Toward this end, the authors seek to extend conversations and draw from Habermas’s theories of communicative action and Principle U to propose a new direction for evaluating public relations ethics. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article presents the findings of a theoretically driven content analysis of the coverage of corporate social responsibility by Expansión, the leading Spanish business journal, in a 1-year time frame. The goal of the article is to help companies understand how they can take advantage of media coverage of CSR by identifying the major stakeholder groups and CSR issues discussed in business news, the positive/negative/mixed tone of the coverage, and the differences that exist in media CSR discourse depending on the (...) industry under scrutiny. The findings are explained under the salience framework of stakeholder theory. (shrink)