“Transparency” as a Double-Edged Sword: Upgrade Your Ethics Strategy

Shannon A. Bowen, Ph.D. (Global Strategic Communication Consortium):

In public relations, “We need more transparency” is one of the most common phrases you’ll hear in a post-crisis debrief, a leadership meeting, or a comms plan draft. It sounds decisive, stakeholder-friendly, and reputationally safe.

But here’s the practical problem: “transparency” is not an ethical standard. It’s a tactic. And like any tactic, it can be used with good intent—or bad: as window dressing, distraction, or a  “data-dump” obfuscation.

This academic article that I authored in 2025 – “Why risky and amoral ‘transparency’ fails as a lone ethical concept” (Mediascapes Journal) – argues that transparency, by itself, is amoral: it doesn’t carry any moral weight until you examine the intention behind it and the impact on stakeholders and audiences.

Why “transparency” often fails in real-world PR:

From a practical standpoint, “transparency” breaks down because it’s vague and easy to end-run:

• It can become a compliance shield: “We disclosed it, so we’re covered.”
• It invites the data dump: publish volumes of material so stakeholders technically have access, but can’t realistically find what matters – hiding the objectionable.
• It shifts the burden: stakeholders, regulators, or journalists end up doing the detective work—while management virtue-signals for “making it public.”
• It can fuel half-truths: information is released in ways optimized for reputation management rather than understanding. It’s a slippery slope.

If you’ve ever seen an annual report bury a material risk in footnotes, or a crisis statement link to a dense FAQ that answers everything except the one relevant question, you’ve seen “transparent” communications that don’t meet the bar for ethical practice. It’s window-dressing.

Replace “transparency” with disclosure standards you can operationalize:

If you want comms your CEO can defend ethically (not just legally), swap the fuzzy concept for PR-ready terms that you can brief, measure, and audit:

• Veracity (truthfulness, not just visibility)
• Full disclosure (what stakeholders need—what is relevant)
• Contextual disclosure (explain meaning, not just facts)
• Clarity and completeness (plain language, no evasive framing)
• Candor (owning uncertainty, constraints, negatives, decisions, and tradeoffs)
• Dialogue (two-way channels, not only one-way posting)

These terms force specificity: What exactly are we disclosing? To whom? In what format? With what context?

A quick “ethical disclosure” checklist for PR leads:

• Intent: Are we sharing this to inform—or to inoculate?
• Stakeholder reality: Can the affected audience find and understand it?
• Relevance: Are we disclosing what matters most, first?
• Context: Did we explain implications, tradeoffs, and what happens next?
• Access: Are there Q&A pathways and feedback loops?
• Ownership: Are we taking responsibility, or outsourcing discovery?

The next time someone says, “Let’s be transparent,” treat it as the starting point—a tactic—not a strategy. It’s time to upgrade your ethics strategy to standards even moral philosophers will  respect! Push the team to discuss and use the real ethical standards that hold weight in terms of rigor: veracity, full contextual disclosure, clarity, and accountable dialogue.

References – Available open access:

Bowen, S. A. (2025). Why risky and amoral ‘transparency’ fails as a lone ethical concept. Mediascapes Journal, 26, 288–310.

+++

A member of the Page Society, Dr. Shannon A. Bowen, Ph.D., is a full Professor at the University of South Carolina. An applied ethicist, she studies ethics in corporate public relations, NGOs, and governmental settings, and also conducts ethics training in these venues. Dr. Bowen’s doctoral dissertation on Kantian ethics won the Robert Heath Outstanding Dissertation Award. Her research in collaboration with The #PRethics Community on organizational gaslighting was included at the 2025 AMEC Summit in Vienna: https://youtu.be/TeoDE9bsOSE. View more conversations about her work on organizational gaslighting issues in PR, here: https://youtu.be/ZDMPUij6aGY