People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA, is a nonprofit animal rights organization known for its controversial approach to communications and public relations. In 2003, PETA launched a new campaign, named Holocaust on Your Plate, that compared the slaughter of animals for human use to the murder of 6 million Jews during World War II. The campaign centered around the power of emotion, and Lisa Lange, the vice president of PETA communications, stated that The idea for the effort came from the late Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote: In relation to them [animals], all people are Nazis; for them it is an eternal Treblinka a death camp in Poland (CNN, 2003). A Jewish PETA member funded the campaign, but this did not lessen the backlash from the Jewish community toward the set of images.
Holocaust on Your Plate juxtaposed 60-square-foot visual displays of animals in slaughterhouses with scenes of Nazi concentration camps. Lange explained that the campaign is shocking, startling, and very hard to look at. We’re attacking the mind-set that condones the slaughter of animals (CNN, 2003). The controversial set of images was released at an exhibit in San Diego, California, and a few months later, a more graphic version was released in Berlin, Germany. The Central Council of Jews in Germany sued PETA in 2004 for the campaign, and in 2009, the German Supreme Court banned the images from the country. Germanys PETA group appealed the European Courts ruling, fighting for their right to display their campaign based on the fundamental principles of free speech. In November 2012, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg voted to uphold the Supreme Court ruling banning the campaign.
A Public Relations representative for PETA, alongside the CEO of the company, justified the campaign by describing it on CNN as The very same mind-set that made the Holocaust possible that we can do anything we want to those we decide are ‘different or inferior’ is what allows us to commit atrocities against animals every single day. PETA stated that its argument was based upon principles of truth. PETA essentially claimed that its campaign, although provocative, used a comparison relating the murder of Jews and animals in a truthful and justified manner.
The United States Anti-Defamation League and several other American human rights groups condemned the campaign, stating that the mass murder of millions of humans cannot, and should not be compared to a chicken or pig. The two main outcomes that may arise from this case: 1) PETAs campaign spreads its pathos-driven message on animal rights successfully, limiting the number of animals consumed by humans, or 2) The campaign angers audiences to a degree that PETA loses the respect and trust that is needed for any form of audience support to ensue
Is Holocaust on Your Plate ethically wrong? Can you ethically justify using the mass-murder of millions in a catastrophic historical event as a communication tool to gain support for ones organization? When? Explain fully, supporting your argument, and discussing the different ethical considerations for a PR or advertising campaign as opposed to a news story. You must cite at least one ethical code in your response.
Legal Reading: Chapter 17 in textbook
Ethics Reading: Read the following ethics codes: Public Relations Society of America: https://www.prsa.org/ethics/code-of-ethics/; American Advertising Federation: https://ams.aaaa.org/eweb/upload/inside/standards.pdf
Reading about Conflicts of Interest: https://rtdna.org/content/guidelines_for_avoiding_conflict_of_interest
use only ethical codes and specific chapter to answer question
